Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program

2024-2025

This work is being conducted in Bucaramanga, Colombia, in collaboration with the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (UNAB) and the school Instituto Caldas. This work seeks to a) develop a single summer course sharing enrollment both from UNAB and from William and Mary (W&M), where the UNAB students travel to W&M so that the class as a whole learns in the United States setting during the first half of the summer session, and then where all travel to UNAB to continue the course in the Colombian setting; b) identify instructional strategies that elementary school in-service teachers at Instituto Caldas use to support their students’ mathematics learning experiences at school, as well as the instructional content these teachers tend to foreground; and c) learn from the expertise of scholars and teachers in UNAB and Instituto Caldas working with immigrant students and parents to inform and enhance courses in teacher preparation programs, and professional development.

Principal Investigator NSF (DRL–2055419): Collaborative Research: Developing Teacher Learning Theory with Teachers and Students Animating Mathematical Concepts

Aug 2021 — Aug 2026

This project will advance theory for understanding teacher learning as it relates to mathematics teacher knowledge and student knowledge. The research team theorizes that teacher knowledge and student knowledge are not distinct. Specifically, this work challenges the longstanding idea in teacher education that a knowledge base for teaching pre-exists as a static body of knowledge awaiting to be discovered by teachers. Instead, this project examines what happens when teacher and student knowledge bases are conceptualized as interdependent and capable of generating new knowledge in and for teacher learning. This project will build theory, grounded in feminist, Indigenous, and materialist perspectives, that explains how teacher knowledge and student knowledge interact to generate new knowledge that is relevant in and for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse mathematics teaching contexts. This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.

This project will develop theory regarding a teacher learning approach that encourages teachers to teachers adopt and exchange flexible roles with their students as active observers and participants to contribute to teachers developing their teacher learning as a relational practice. Drawing on lesson study and Indigenous research design principles, researchers, teachers, and their students will collaborate to create animated concepts of mathematical ideas. Animated concepts include how students use mental images, material objects, and lived experiences that center Black, Native American, Latina, and newcomer knowledge bases related to mathematical concepts. Researchers across three sites in Michigan, Virginia, and New Mexico will immerse two teachers per research location and their students in this process both during the school year and during a summer program where teachers and students will collaborate with local artists to produce multimedia projects representative of their animated concepts. This research has implications for how mathematical teacher knowledge is conceptualized and how it is addressed via professional development.

Co–Principal Investigator NSF (DRL — 2219317): Supporting computational thinking across grade levels and content areas in K-5 education

Aug 2022 — Aug 2025

This is a collaborative project between Southern Oregon University and School of Education at William & Mary. The project began in the Fall of 2022. This research study is centered around three conjectures: (1) CT concepts become more intertwined as grade-level and complexity of content increase; (2) CT can be used as an instructional practice that facilitates the learning of language; (3) CT novices can become teacher leaders that support new teachers in their districts. The plan to investigate these three conjectures is split across three years. During Year 1 the established RPP is revising the CT professional development series developed through a previous award and is onboarding a new cohort of teachers. During Year 2, the RPP teachers lead the new teachers through the process of integrating CT into existing core-content lessons. In Year 3, a new set of teacher leaders support others as they continue designing, developing, delivering, reflecting on, and revising CT lessons. Lesson plans, feedback, revisions and reflections are analyzed to determine how CT changes across grades and content areas. These artifacts, along with video recordings and observations of lesson delivery, are used to study where CT is evolving as an effective content-neutral instructional practice that supports language development. Through a sequential design quantitative survey, data inform the questions asked in qualitive follow-up reflections, observations and interviews. Using a mixed methods approach, data are analyzed to identify trends in both monolingual and bilingual classrooms to ensure a comprehensive perspective for understanding the learning, use, and incorporation of CT and how these practices can be disseminated widely. This project is funded by the CS for All: Research and RPPs program.

Co–Principal Investigator NSF (DRL–1923633): Empowering K-5 Teachers in Southern Oregon Through Computational Thinking

Oct 2019 — Sept 2022

This is a collaborative project between Southern Oregon University, the School of Education at William & Mary and the American Institutes for Research. The project began in Fall 2019, when the National Science Foundation awarded Southern Oregon University a 2-year CSforAll:RPP grant. The focus of the grant is integrating computational thinking (CT) into the K-5 instruction of general elementary and elementary bilingual teachers. Four local elementary teachers joined the project in October 2019 and began working with the university researchers. The first year was broken up into three phases: building CT content knowledge, co-creating lesson plans that integrate CT across elementary subjects, and developing a five day in-person CT summer institute (SI) for 16 new teachers who will join the project for the following school year.

Supporting Bilingual Teachers in Extending Bilingual Children’s Mathematical Thinking

This is a collaborative project with Grace Hopkins, an amazing elementary school teacher in Austin, Texas. The project is funded under a small William & Mary grant. It started as a way for me to identify what type of support novice elementary bilingual teachers need to teach mathematics as they engage in supporting and extending emergent bilingual students’ mathematical thinking. The project has been extended one more year and it has developed into a productive collaboration where teaching practice and research intersect.

William & Mary — Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (UNAB)

In 2019 the School of Education at William & Mary and UNAB established a partnership that has opened the doors for multiple collaborations for faculty and students. Some examples of this collaboration are:

• Each year UNAB brings a group of scholars to D.C. as part of their Diplomacia Cultural y Relaciones Internacionales program. With them, I have visited the Organization of the American States, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. We are working together to combine efforts and develop a Summer course at D.C. for students from both W&M and UNAB.
• A long-term goal of this partnership is to establish student exchanges in such a way as to promote cultural awareness and to provide students with more opportunities for learning. We have started to lay the groundwork by re-designing our mathematics methods courses in both institutions. The goal is that our students enrolled in these courses start to connect and experience learning to teach mathematics in these different contexts.

You can read more about this partnership here.

Responsive Teaching in Elementary Mathematics

RTEM (Responsive Teaching in Elementary Mathematics) is a four-year research project that addresses these questions by investigating the development of teaching that is responsive to children’s thinking about fractions in grades 3–5.