Recent Projects

I work collaboratively with districts, schools, teachers, and families to support children in learning content and practices in child-centered and inquiry-based ways and about issues that are relevant and important to themselves and their communities. I focus on equitable and just teaching approaches and these can be shaped by the needs and wants of a particular community.  

Another important part of my center work is developing and obtaining externally funded projects. Over the last decade, I have been part of the development, writing, submission, and procuring of three National Science Foundation grants totaling approximately $7.9 million (in addition to leading and collaborating on various other externally funded grant projects).  While these three NSF projects all have different foci, they all are aligned with the OCEMS' mission of equity.  The Access, Agency, and Allies in Mathematical Systems project was funded in 2014 and the RALLY for STEM Noyce Teacher Fellowship Program was funded in 2018.

My most recently awarded project, Connecting Elementary Mathematics Teaching to Real-World Issues (aka Connecting Math to the Real World), is a collaborative project with faculty at Ohio University and Portland State University that focuses on making elementary mathematics meaningful and applicable inside and outside of the classroom by connecting math to real-world topics, including social and political issues, that are relevant to children’s and community members’ lives. This project involves close work with a team of local teachers at both sites to inform our work as teachers and researchers. During the 2022-2023 year, I taught 3rd grade mathematics in a partner teacher's classroom where we examined our planning and implementation of our mathematics lessons and the development of the classroom community. We currently are developing "Records of Practice" from the data we collected and further refining our framework for the design and enactment of tasks that connect mathematics to the real world.