Dissertation Projects
Equitable Collaboration with Nondominant Families to Build Infrastructure for Culturally Sustaining Mathematics Teaching at the Elementary Level
Traditional mathematics classrooms in the US still require students from minoritized groups to conform to dominant paradigms, sidelining their cultural heritage and community practices. Researchers in the field propose different and complementary frameworks that center and sustain diverse students’ cultural and linguistic identities. However, a need remains to work with teachers in partnership to build infrastructures that support them in implementing culturally sustaining pedagogies in their mathematics instruction. For this, solidarity-driven collaborations with families and community members that challenge traditional power dynamics have great potential. My dissertation is a community-engaged research initiative in the context of a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) with two elementary schools serving predominantly Latinx families. A key component is the “Family Math Leadership Team” (FMLT), a multilingual space where caregivers, teachers, and researchers collaborate to co-design support for children’s mathematical learning. Employing qualitative methods, I analyze how participants use their linguistic repertoires to assert mathematical epistemic authority in service of the collaboration in the FMLT meetings. In addition, I study how two of the participating teachers transform their vision of mathematics instruction and teaching practices across the three years of the partnership. The studies contribute to our understanding of how schools can integrate families’ and communities’ voices into mathematics education to support culturally sustaining teaching practices.
Supporting Immigrant English Learners in Linguistically Diverse Contexts: A Multilevel Analysis
As the number of recently-arrived immigrant English Learners (ELs) continues to rise in the United States, understanding the pedagogical practices and school structures that maximize these students’ academic success and socioemotional health—and ensuring teachers and schools are equipped to carry out these practices—remains critical. Prior research has given limited attention to how different linguistic contexts, including the language backgrounds of students and teachers, may affect what practices are used and/or most effective. There is also a need for further research on how programs tailored to this student population are enacted. Accordingly, this dissertation will focus on two interconnected aspects of schooling crucial to supporting immigrant ELs: 1) pedagogical practices of teachers in linguistically diverse classrooms and 2) programmatic structures of educational institutions that support (or hinder) students and teachers in meeting their students’ needs. Using qualitative case study approaches, this work leverages an ongoing partnership with a network of academies embedded within U.S. public secondary schools and specifically designed for newcomer ELs. These institutions provide an opportune context to study important questions related to linguistic heterogeneity and pedagogy, as well as implementation of specialized programs within schools, two areas which will contribute to research on how immigrant ELs can be better served in U.S. secondary schools.
Investigating Asset-Based Noticing of Student Mathematical Thinking Through Designed Teacher Collaboration
Noticing student mathematical thinking is widely considered a core component of teacher expertise. Recently, scholars have begun to explore teachers’ noticing of strengths in students’ mathematical thinking as a response to culturally embedded deficit discourses surrounding the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, there is limited research on how asset-based noticing can be developed and maintained through collaboration or how it relates to teachers’ practices. My dissertation uses a design-based implementation research approach to explore teachers’ asset-based noticing and learning in collaborative settings. Elementary school teachers are asked to notice strengths in students’ written work and plan next instructional steps through a designed collaboration protocol. Qualitative analyses unveil the nature of teachers’ asset-based noticing of student mathematical thinking, its relation to students’ learning opportunities and classroom experiences, and teachers’ learning to plan responsively. Implications from this research will contribute to an understanding of the complexity and nuance of asset-based perspectives for noticing and inform the design of teacher collaboration anchored in student work as a site for teacher learning.
CoDesigning Practical Measures with a Mathematics Teacher to Support Noticing for Equity
Teacher noticing has been identified as a core construct of expert teaching and a useful avenue for disrupting inequities. However, most research on teacher noticing does not draw closely on how students experience the classroom. Drawing on improvement science methods, I partner with one secondary mathematics teacher to iteratively codevelop practical measures – in the form of four-question surveys and interview protocols – to gain insight into students’ experiences. I take a formative intervention lens to characterize a teacher’s learning to notice through the process of designing and learning from student feedback. Thus, this study aims to contribute to the development of more equitable and expansive noticing practices.
Reclaiming Student-Teacher Affinity Spaces As Creative Sites of Justice
A large body of work has documented how teachers, often those who have been treated unjustly, enter the teaching with commitments to support marginalized youth and make strides towards more emancipatory futures. For instance, queer teachers challenge heteronormative and gender-normative educational spaces (Wells, 2017), and Latina teachers can serve as cultural guardians for Latinx youth (Flores, 2017). Whereas the justice disposition and development of practicing teachers has been explored, less attention has been paid to student teachers. This dissertation presents ethnographic cases of student teachers becoming social justice educators and how affinity spaces served as a site of imagination, community care, and racial justice.
Co-design as a Site for Teacher Sensemaking and Engagement with Justice-Centered Science Instruction
Literature highlights the practices and ideologies of teachers who are successfully or unsuccessfully enacting justice-centered science instruction, but research is still emerging on the processes of teacher learning towards the field’s contemporary understanding. This study explores how science teachers learn to engage in justice-centered science instruction in the context of a long-term, research-practice partnership project. Specifically, we analyze how a group of high school biology teachers made sense of justice-centered science instruction collectively over the course of two years. We draw upon two frameworks, ‘ideology in pieces’ (Philip, 2011) and Goodwin’s (2018) ‘co-operative action’ to understand teachers’ dynamically shaping sensemaking of justice-centered instruction in the intersections of structure, identities and local activities. In this study, two white teachers and two Latinx teachers draw upon their everyday knowledge, what they hold as common sense, and formal knowledge gained through professional learning experiences (Philip, 2011; DiSessa & Sherin, 1998) to make sense of concepts relating to equity, justice, and civic engagement. Preliminary analysis reveals three things: 1) teachers’ identities, historical relationships, and professional learning experiences shape how teachers engage in discourse around developing the co-design unit, 2) these identities and power-ladened structures embedded within the PD, district and society shape whose ideas are centralized and peripheralized during each meeting, and 3) the pedagogical-decisions made by the co-design team are a result of these power-laden structures that are dynamic, changing over time as the team participates more and more in this shared professional learning experience.
Alumni Dissertation Projects
Exploring Preservice Teachers’ Learning for Responsive and Improvisational Practice
Improvisation has been identified as an essential aspect of teaching practice, particularly in terms of equitable and responsive instruction. At the same time, however, improvisation is difficult to define and correspondingly difficult to cultivate. To develop the field’s understanding of improvisation and incorporate it more centrally in the work of teacher education, I conducted three studies elaborating the character and importance of improvisation in teaching. In the first study, I introduce a conceptual framework that explicates the conditions of teaching that require improvisation and the practices teachers use to navigate those conditions. I then apply that framework to analyze classroom events from a preservice teacher’s field placement, illustrating that teaching is improvisational even in novice practice. In the second study, I focus on one component of the framework presented in Study 1 and apply it to a range of teaching cases to examine how teachers conceptualize and enact structures in the course of their improvisation. The third study takes a design-based research approach to explore how preservice teachers can be supported in making sense of teaching events through an improvisational lens. By analyzing how collaborative analysis of video positioned preservice teachers to engage in generative discourse and sensemaking, this study highlights essential practices for cultivating improvisational reasoning. Together, these studies contribute to how teaching practice is understood and how preservice teachers are prepared to enter the profession, offering a path forward for designing experiences that support the development of improvisational teaching.
Collaborative Video Analysis to Support Pre-Service Teacher Noticing and Learning toward Action-Based Orientations to Language
Instruction for students classified as English Learners (EL-classified) in the US has been dominated by formalist orientations to language development that view learners as blank slates and often focus instruction on acquiring decontextualized linguistic forms in segregated learning spaces. Many language scholars argue that these orientations are insufficient in promoting meaningful language and content learning and limit EL-classified students’ contributions and participation. In contrast, sociocultural and ecologically-informed scholarship proposes more equitable, action-based orientations to language development, where all learners are positioned to co-construct meaning in carefully scaffolded dialogic activity across the curriculum. This dissertation project explores the potential of collaborative video analysis to target Pre-Service Teacher (PST) noticing and learning towards these action-based orientations. This qualitative study follows a group of PSTs pursuing History-Social Science secondary teaching credentials and their Teacher Supervisor across multiple collaborative video analysis sessions in a US university-based teacher preparation program. In these sessions, participants worked together to narrate, re-narrate, and re-envision videos of PST teaching with a unique focus on noticing student language use and imagining more action-based language supports. Both interactional and individual data were collected including video recordings and field notes of the collaborative sessions and participant interviews and written reflections. I applied an ethnomethodological approach and Cross-Event Discourse Analysis to collecting and analyzing interactional data including video recordings, transcripts, and participant observations of video analysis sessions, together with individual data including interview transcripts and written reflections from participants. Findings suggest that structured collaborative discourse around classroom videos contributed to important shifts in participant noticing and reasoning toward more equitable action-based orientations to student language use and EL-classified learner contributions in their discipline. This study highlights the unique potential of video-embedded, interactive sense making across the PST learning ecosystem to prepare PSTs to notice and take up more effective and equitable action-based orientations to instruction for EL-classified students in their discipline.
Zoning out of Zoom and Zooming In towards Learning Experience Design to Support Undergraduate Teaching and Learning
My dissertation details three studies that will examine undergraduates online learning modalities through the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, my dissertation will first look across theories of mind-wandering and cognitive engagement and develop a model examining the social, cognitive, and behavioral impacts on students’ learning experiences while learning synchronously on Zoom. Then, I use this model and mechanistic findings to conduct and inform a series of design-based research (DBR) studies in order to design, develop, and deploy an asynchronous online course grounded on the learning experience design (LXD) pedagogical paradigm. Finally, Study 3 will consider the affordances and constraints of Study 2 and further iterate on these designs to conduct a quasi-experimental study testing the efficacy of different interactive course elements (i.e. embedded video questions) in an online asynchronous undergraduate course grounded in LXD. Thus, across all three studies, I will critically examine how online course modalities and LXD pedagogies underlie social, cognitive, and behavioral factors influencing students’ learning experiences with the hope that such efforts will lead to the evidence-based implementation of pedagogical practices. The goal of this dissertation is to continue supporting a broad range of learners online, in-person, or hybrid learning modalities that address learners’ needs in a human-centered empathetic approach as the ever-changing landscape of teaching and learning in higher education continues to evolve.
Promoting Equitable Pathways in Engineering and Career Technical Education
TBA
The Influence of Immersive Experiences on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: An Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Study
My research examines the influence of a teacher intervention that focuses on the development of empathy and color consciousness, as a method to facilitate, motivate, and support the enactment of culturally responsive pedagogy. This study is an explanatory sequential mixed method design that uses a multitude of data including surveys, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and participant artifacts. I hope this research can help teachers feel supported and empowered in ways that promote the enactment of more culturally responsive teaching practices to meet the growing and shifting needs of students of color. The demographics of the United States’ public-school systems are becoming more diverse and culture is central to learning. Therefore, teachers must be prepared to take an asset-based approach that acknowledges, responds to, and celebrates students’ culture to design content, foster environments, and create opportunities that are equitable for a multicultural student demographic.
Designing Systems to Promote Collaboration and Systems Thinking in High School Science Group Discussion
Preparation for the future workforce and citizenry requires students to learn collaborative skills to apply knowledge in new contexts and promote innovation. With the increasing integration of technology in learning environments, collaboration spans both human-human and human-technology relationships. In her dissertation, Ha designs collaborative chatbots, in collaboration with informal science educators, teachers, learners, and researchers, to scaffold collaboration and deeper learning of STEM content. The studies illustrate how multidimensional analyses of learner interactions can provide insights into social and cognitive processes guiding learning. They also illuminate how design tweaks can facilitate certain social and reasoning patterns, ones that enrich learning, human-human, and human-technology collaboration.
Learning to enact equitable mathematics teaching practices through critical self-reflection: a study of primary teacher candidates
My dissertation project examines the role of critical reflection in supporting teacher candidates to develop their identities as equitable mathematics teachers and enact equitable practices in mathematics classrooms. Unequal learning opportunities in mathematics classrooms for children, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, continue to persist. Rigid ways of acknowledging mathematical participation and competency continue to dominate many classrooms and systematically categorizes children into a hierarchy of intelligence, excluding those perceived as incompetent from learning opportunities. This has implications for children’s mathematical identities and future careers. Teacher education can play a significant role in disrupting these injustices. My study aims to develop a theoretical mapping of candidates’ different learning trajectories when engaged in critical self-reflection work and a protocol that teacher educators can utilize to support candidates’ learning.
Civic engagement of marginalized youth: Friendship networks and motivation
Grounded in a long-term research-practice partnership, my dissertation investigates the role of social networks in the civic engagement of adolescents at a high school that serves primarily low-income Latinx students. First, I develop a novel model of youth civic motivation grounded in expectancy-value theory. Then, I apply longitudinal social network analysis techniques to distinguish between the effects of friendship formation and motivational antecedents on civic engagement. Through an asset-based approach that acknowledges agentic decisions regarding civic participation rather than framing behavior in terms of deficiency, I seek to understand psychosocial predictors of civic engagement for youth who are underrepresented in both research and policy. I aim to provide novel insight into the diverse manifestations of civic engagement in ways that inform practice, which I believe is especially important as our youth confront an increasingly contentious sociopolitical landscape.
The Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline
My research looks into how Latinx men conceptualize the teaching profession and how that functions to either motivate them to pursue a career as educators or dissuades them from the profession. This is done using semi-structured interviews of Latinx male high school students, teacher credential students and veteran teachers to track how this conceptualization changes throughout the leaky Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline. I hope this research can be used to recruit diverse educators by creating culturally responsive strategies that speak to what truly motivates these men to pursue a career as teachers, which is pivotal if our educators are to keep pace with our increasingly diverse student population.
Understanding the Practices and Processes of Doing Networked Improvement Science in a Teacher Preparation Network
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
[Re]imagining Student Mathematical Engagement through Problem Posing Pedagogy
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
Designing After School Science Programs to Connect Schools, Homes, and Communities
The purpose of this study is to investigate how to develop science after school programs that support the deep and meaningful STEM engagement of girls of color. This project will focus on how to empirically test design features in a research practice partnership with a local school.
Participation in a Video Club: Influences on Teachers and Teaching, Students and Learning
This study investigates the critical discourses developed by high school science teachers engaged in a semester-long video club professional development series. The focus of the video club was to enhance participants’ abilities to facilitate students’ thinking and reasoning in science.
Appropriating and Enacting Literacy Teaching Practices in the Context of the Pathway Project Professional Development Program
In this study, I investigate the types of pedagogical tools middle school English teachers take up and adapt from literacy professional development. Moreover, I am also interested in how these tools shape their own learning as well as their students’ learning. Finally, I also seek to understand cognitive and contextual factors that may influence how teachers are enacting these tools in their classrooms.
Broadening participation in mathematics for students from non-dominant backgrounds: The relationship between teacher practice, noticing and pedagogical commitments
This study draws on the construct of teacher noticing to examine how teachers attend to and reason about classroom features that influence learning opportunities for non-dominant groups. Just as research examines how teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and identities influence their practice, I use the lens of noticing to explain the cognitive processes teachers use engaging in these teaching practices. Through this work, I seek to make explicit the noticing of secondary mathematics teachers and the relationship between their noticing, practices and pedagogical commitments.
Physical Therapist Students’ Clinical Reasoning and Characterizations of Practice
This study investigates how doctor of physical therapy students engage in clinical problem solving. Specifically, I examine the types of problems students frame and solve during an encounter with a patient and how their perspectives on practice influence their clinical decision making.
A Model of Professional Development for Field-Based Teacher Educators: Addressing Historical Problems Through Local Collaboration
This dissertation examines a professional development intervention that brought together university supervisors of student teaching with partner classroom mentor teachers to develop a shared vision of mathematics instruction and shared approaches to mentoring pre-service teachers in the field. The study contributes to practice-based teacher education by offering a model design university-school collaborations aimed at supporting pre-service teachers in connecting learning across university and field site settings.
A Longitudinal Investigation of Beginning Teachers’ Conceptions and Enactments of Equity-Minded Mathematics Practices
This study examines the factors that impact the retention and attrition of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school teachers and support or impede their development and implementation of reform-based, equity-minded mathematics practices.
Learning Affordances for Teachers and Students in a Summer Lab School
I examine an alternative teacher certification program aimed at preparing primarily Latinx and African American teacher candidates for instruction in segregated urban schools. In this project I work closely with first year teachers as they prepare and begin teaching in their own classroom to identify ways of improving urban science teacher preparation and opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with and learn science.
Collaborative Video Analysis to Support Pre-Service Teacher Noticing and Learning toward Action-Based Orientations to Language
Instruction for students classified as English Learners (EL-classified) in the US has been dominated by formalist orientations to language development that view learners as blank slates and often focus instruction on acquiring decontextualized linguistic forms in segregated learning spaces. Many language scholars argue that these orientations are insufficient in promoting meaningful language and content learning and limit EL-classified students’ contributions and participation. In contrast, sociocultural and ecologically-informed scholarship proposes more equitable, action-based orientations to language development, where all learners are positioned to co-construct meaning in carefully scaffolded dialogic activity across the curriculum. This dissertation project explores the potential of collaborative video analysis to target Pre-Service Teacher (PST) noticing and learning towards these action-based orientations. This qualitative study follows a group of PSTs pursuing History-Social Science secondary teaching credentials and their Teacher Supervisor across multiple collaborative video analysis sessions in a US university-based teacher preparation program. In these sessions, participants worked together to narrate, re-narrate, and re-envision videos of PST teaching with a unique focus on noticing student language use and imagining more action-based language supports. Both interactional and individual data were collected including video recordings and field notes of the collaborative sessions and participant interviews and written reflections. I applied an ethnomethodological approach and Cross-Event Discourse Analysis to collecting and analyzing interactional data including video recordings, transcripts, and participant observations of video analysis sessions, together with individual data including interview transcripts and written reflections from participants. Findings suggest that structured collaborative discourse around classroom videos contributed to important shifts in participant noticing and reasoning toward more equitable action-based orientations to student language use and EL-classified learner contributions in their discipline. This study highlights the unique potential of video-embedded, interactive sense making across the PST learning ecosystem to prepare PSTs to notice and take up more effective and equitable action-based orientations to instruction for EL-classified students in their discipline.
Zoning out of Zoom and Zooming In towards Learning Experience Design to Support Undergraduate Teaching and Learning
My dissertation details three studies that will examine undergraduates online learning modalities through the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, my dissertation will first look across theories of mind-wandering and cognitive engagement and develop a model examining the social, cognitive, and behavioral impacts on students’ learning experiences while learning synchronously on Zoom. Then, I use this model and mechanistic findings to conduct and inform a series of design-based research (DBR) studies in order to design, develop, and deploy an asynchronous online course grounded on the learning experience design (LXD) pedagogical paradigm. Finally, Study 3 will consider the affordances and constraints of Study 2 and further iterate on these designs to conduct a quasi-experimental study testing the efficacy of different interactive course elements (i.e. embedded video questions) in an online asynchronous undergraduate course grounded in LXD. Thus, across all three studies, I will critically examine how online course modalities and LXD pedagogies underlie social, cognitive, and behavioral factors influencing students’ learning experiences with the hope that such efforts will lead to the evidence-based implementation of pedagogical practices. The goal of this dissertation is to continue supporting a broad range of learners online, in-person, or hybrid learning modalities that address learners’ needs in a human-centered empathetic approach as the ever-changing landscape of teaching and learning in higher education continues to evolve.
Alumni Dissertation Projects
Promoting Equitable Pathways in Engineering and Career Technical Education
TBA
The Influence of Immersive Experiences on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: An Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Study
My research examines the influence of a teacher intervention that focuses on the development of empathy and color consciousness, as a method to facilitate, motivate, and support the enactment of culturally responsive pedagogy. This study is an explanatory sequential mixed method design that uses a multitude of data including surveys, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and participant artifacts. I hope this research can help teachers feel supported and empowered in ways that promote the enactment of more culturally responsive teaching practices to meet the growing and shifting needs of students of color. The demographics of the United States’ public-school systems are becoming more diverse and culture is central to learning. Therefore, teachers must be prepared to take an asset-based approach that acknowledges, responds to, and celebrates students’ culture to design content, foster environments, and create opportunities that are equitable for a multicultural student demographic.
Designing Systems to Promote Collaboration and Systems Thinking in High School Science Group Discussion
Preparation for the future workforce and citizenry requires students to learn collaborative skills to apply knowledge in new contexts and promote innovation. With the increasing integration of technology in learning environments, collaboration spans both human-human and human-technology relationships. In her dissertation, Ha designs collaborative chatbots, in collaboration with informal science educators, teachers, learners, and researchers, to scaffold collaboration and deeper learning of STEM content. The studies illustrate how multidimensional analyses of learner interactions can provide insights into social and cognitive processes guiding learning. They also illuminate how design tweaks can facilitate certain social and reasoning patterns, ones that enrich learning, human-human, and human-technology collaboration.
Learning to enact equitable mathematics teaching practices through critical self-reflection: a study of primary teacher candidates
My dissertation project examines the role of critical reflection in supporting teacher candidates to develop their identities as equitable mathematics teachers and enact equitable practices in mathematics classrooms. Unequal learning opportunities in mathematics classrooms for children, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, continue to persist. Rigid ways of acknowledging mathematical participation and competency continue to dominate many classrooms and systematically categorizes children into a hierarchy of intelligence, excluding those perceived as incompetent from learning opportunities. This has implications for children’s mathematical identities and future careers. Teacher education can play a significant role in disrupting these injustices. My study aims to develop a theoretical mapping of candidates’ different learning trajectories when engaged in critical self-reflection work and a protocol that teacher educators can utilize to support candidates’ learning.
Civic engagement of marginalized youth: Friendship networks and motivation
Grounded in a long-term research-practice partnership, my dissertation investigates the role of social networks in the civic engagement of adolescents at a high school that serves primarily low-income Latinx students. First, I develop a novel model of youth civic motivation grounded in expectancy-value theory. Then, I apply longitudinal social network analysis techniques to distinguish between the effects of friendship formation and motivational antecedents on civic engagement. Through an asset-based approach that acknowledges agentic decisions regarding civic participation rather than framing behavior in terms of deficiency, I seek to understand psychosocial predictors of civic engagement for youth who are underrepresented in both research and policy. I aim to provide novel insight into the diverse manifestations of civic engagement in ways that inform practice, which I believe is especially important as our youth confront an increasingly contentious sociopolitical landscape.
The Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline
My research looks into how Latinx men conceptualize the teaching profession and how that functions to either motivate them to pursue a career as educators or dissuades them from the profession. This is done using semi-structured interviews of Latinx male high school students, teacher credential students and veteran teachers to track how this conceptualization changes throughout the leaky Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline. I hope this research can be used to recruit diverse educators by creating culturally responsive strategies that speak to what truly motivates these men to pursue a career as teachers, which is pivotal if our educators are to keep pace with our increasingly diverse student population.
Understanding the Practices and Processes of Doing Networked Improvement Science in a Teacher Preparation Network
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
[Re]imagining Student Mathematical Engagement through Problem Posing Pedagogy
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
Designing After School Science Programs to Connect Schools, Homes, and Communities
The purpose of this study is to investigate how to develop science after school programs that support the deep and meaningful STEM engagement of girls of color. This project will focus on how to empirically test design features in a research practice partnership with a local school.
Participation in a Video Club: Influences on Teachers and Teaching, Students and Learning
This study investigates the critical discourses developed by high school science teachers engaged in a semester-long video club professional development series. The focus of the video club was to enhance participants’ abilities to facilitate students’ thinking and reasoning in science.
Appropriating and Enacting Literacy Teaching Practices in the Context of the Pathway Project Professional Development Program
In this study, I investigate the types of pedagogical tools middle school English teachers take up and adapt from literacy professional development. Moreover, I am also interested in how these tools shape their own learning as well as their students’ learning. Finally, I also seek to understand cognitive and contextual factors that may influence how teachers are enacting these tools in their classrooms.
Broadening participation in mathematics for students from non-dominant backgrounds: The relationship between teacher practice, noticing and pedagogical commitments
This study draws on the construct of teacher noticing to examine how teachers attend to and reason about classroom features that influence learning opportunities for non-dominant groups. Just as research examines how teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and identities influence their practice, I use the lens of noticing to explain the cognitive processes teachers use engaging in these teaching practices. Through this work, I seek to make explicit the noticing of secondary mathematics teachers and the relationship between their noticing, practices and pedagogical commitments.
Physical Therapist Students’ Clinical Reasoning and Characterizations of Practice
This study investigates how doctor of physical therapy students engage in clinical problem solving. Specifically, I examine the types of problems students frame and solve during an encounter with a patient and how their perspectives on practice influence their clinical decision making.
A Model of Professional Development for Field-Based Teacher Educators: Addressing Historical Problems Through Local Collaboration
This dissertation examines a professional development intervention that brought together university supervisors of student teaching with partner classroom mentor teachers to develop a shared vision of mathematics instruction and shared approaches to mentoring pre-service teachers in the field. The study contributes to practice-based teacher education by offering a model design university-school collaborations aimed at supporting pre-service teachers in connecting learning across university and field site settings.
A Longitudinal Investigation of Beginning Teachers’ Conceptions and Enactments of Equity-Minded Mathematics Practices
This study examines the factors that impact the retention and attrition of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school teachers and support or impede their development and implementation of reform-based, equity-minded mathematics practices.
Learning Affordances for Teachers and Students in a Summer Lab School
I examine an alternative teacher certification program aimed at preparing primarily Latinx and African American teacher candidates for instruction in segregated urban schools. In this project I work closely with first year teachers as they prepare and begin teaching in their own classroom to identify ways of improving urban science teacher preparation and opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with and learn science.
Collaborative Video Analysis to Support Pre-Service Teacher Noticing and Learning toward Action-Based Orientations to Language
Instruction for students classified as English Learners (EL-classified) in the US has been dominated by formalist orientations to language development that view learners as blank slates and often focus instruction on acquiring decontextualized linguistic forms in segregated learning spaces. Many language scholars argue that these orientations are insufficient in promoting meaningful language and content learning and limit EL-classified students’ contributions and participation. In contrast, sociocultural and ecologically-informed scholarship proposes more equitable, action-based orientations to language development, where all learners are positioned to co-construct meaning in carefully scaffolded dialogic activity across the curriculum. This dissertation project explores the potential of collaborative video analysis to target Pre-Service Teacher (PST) noticing and learning towards these action-based orientations. This qualitative study follows a group of PSTs pursuing History-Social Science secondary teaching credentials and their Teacher Supervisor across multiple collaborative video analysis sessions in a US university-based teacher preparation program. In these sessions, participants worked together to narrate, re-narrate, and re-envision videos of PST teaching with a unique focus on noticing student language use and imagining more action-based language supports. Both interactional and individual data were collected including video recordings and field notes of the collaborative sessions and participant interviews and written reflections. I applied an ethnomethodological approach and Cross-Event Discourse Analysis to collecting and analyzing interactional data including video recordings, transcripts, and participant observations of video analysis sessions, together with individual data including interview transcripts and written reflections from participants. Findings suggest that structured collaborative discourse around classroom videos contributed to important shifts in participant noticing and reasoning toward more equitable action-based orientations to student language use and EL-classified learner contributions in their discipline. This study highlights the unique potential of video-embedded, interactive sense making across the PST learning ecosystem to prepare PSTs to notice and take up more effective and equitable action-based orientations to instruction for EL-classified students in their discipline.
Zoning out of Zoom and Zooming In towards Learning Experience Design to Support Undergraduate Teaching and Learning
My dissertation details three studies that will examine undergraduates online learning modalities through the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, my dissertation will first look across theories of mind-wandering and cognitive engagement and develop a model examining the social, cognitive, and behavioral impacts on students’ learning experiences while learning synchronously on Zoom. Then, I use this model and mechanistic findings to conduct and inform a series of design-based research (DBR) studies in order to design, develop, and deploy an asynchronous online course grounded on the learning experience design (LXD) pedagogical paradigm. Finally, Study 3 will consider the affordances and constraints of Study 2 and further iterate on these designs to conduct a quasi-experimental study testing the efficacy of different interactive course elements (i.e. embedded video questions) in an online asynchronous undergraduate course grounded in LXD. Thus, across all three studies, I will critically examine how online course modalities and LXD pedagogies underlie social, cognitive, and behavioral factors influencing students’ learning experiences with the hope that such efforts will lead to the evidence-based implementation of pedagogical practices. The goal of this dissertation is to continue supporting a broad range of learners online, in-person, or hybrid learning modalities that address learners’ needs in a human-centered empathetic approach as the ever-changing landscape of teaching and learning in higher education continues to evolve.
Alumni Dissertation Projects
Promoting Equitable Pathways in Engineering and Career Technical Education
TBA
The Influence of Immersive Experiences on Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: An Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Study
My research examines the influence of a teacher intervention that focuses on the development of empathy and color consciousness, as a method to facilitate, motivate, and support the enactment of culturally responsive pedagogy. This study is an explanatory sequential mixed method design that uses a multitude of data including surveys, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and participant artifacts. I hope this research can help teachers feel supported and empowered in ways that promote the enactment of more culturally responsive teaching practices to meet the growing and shifting needs of students of color. The demographics of the United States’ public-school systems are becoming more diverse and culture is central to learning. Therefore, teachers must be prepared to take an asset-based approach that acknowledges, responds to, and celebrates students’ culture to design content, foster environments, and create opportunities that are equitable for a multicultural student demographic.
Designing Systems to Promote Collaboration and Systems Thinking in High School Science Group Discussion
Preparation for the future workforce and citizenry requires students to learn collaborative skills to apply knowledge in new contexts and promote innovation. With the increasing integration of technology in learning environments, collaboration spans both human-human and human-technology relationships. In her dissertation, Ha designs collaborative chatbots, in collaboration with informal science educators, teachers, learners, and researchers, to scaffold collaboration and deeper learning of STEM content. The studies illustrate how multidimensional analyses of learner interactions can provide insights into social and cognitive processes guiding learning. They also illuminate how design tweaks can facilitate certain social and reasoning patterns, ones that enrich learning, human-human, and human-technology collaboration.
Learning to enact equitable mathematics teaching practices through critical self-reflection: a study of primary teacher candidates
My dissertation project examines the role of critical reflection in supporting teacher candidates to develop their identities as equitable mathematics teachers and enact equitable practices in mathematics classrooms. Unequal learning opportunities in mathematics classrooms for children, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, continue to persist. Rigid ways of acknowledging mathematical participation and competency continue to dominate many classrooms and systematically categorizes children into a hierarchy of intelligence, excluding those perceived as incompetent from learning opportunities. This has implications for children’s mathematical identities and future careers. Teacher education can play a significant role in disrupting these injustices. My study aims to develop a theoretical mapping of candidates’ different learning trajectories when engaged in critical self-reflection work and a protocol that teacher educators can utilize to support candidates’ learning.
Civic engagement of marginalized youth: Friendship networks and motivation
Grounded in a long-term research-practice partnership, my dissertation investigates the role of social networks in the civic engagement of adolescents at a high school that serves primarily low-income Latinx students. First, I develop a novel model of youth civic motivation grounded in expectancy-value theory. Then, I apply longitudinal social network analysis techniques to distinguish between the effects of friendship formation and motivational antecedents on civic engagement. Through an asset-based approach that acknowledges agentic decisions regarding civic participation rather than framing behavior in terms of deficiency, I seek to understand psychosocial predictors of civic engagement for youth who are underrepresented in both research and policy. I aim to provide novel insight into the diverse manifestations of civic engagement in ways that inform practice, which I believe is especially important as our youth confront an increasingly contentious sociopolitical landscape.
The Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline
My research looks into how Latinx men conceptualize the teaching profession and how that functions to either motivate them to pursue a career as educators or dissuades them from the profession. This is done using semi-structured interviews of Latinx male high school students, teacher credential students and veteran teachers to track how this conceptualization changes throughout the leaky Latinx Male Teacher Pipeline. I hope this research can be used to recruit diverse educators by creating culturally responsive strategies that speak to what truly motivates these men to pursue a career as teachers, which is pivotal if our educators are to keep pace with our increasingly diverse student population.
Understanding the Practices and Processes of Doing Networked Improvement Science in a Teacher Preparation Network
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
[Re]imagining Student Mathematical Engagement through Problem Posing Pedagogy
This study focuses on examining how networked improvement communities (NICs) are enacted using a NIC run by the California Teacher Education Research and Improvement Network. The work of performing NICs is comprised of micropolitics and power relations that shape what improvement efforts focus on, what aims they seek to accomplish, and how they attempt to accomplish their aims. I seek to unveil these dynamics to understand how NICs operate and in what ways the processes can be improved, particularly for advancing equity and social justice.
Designing After School Science Programs to Connect Schools, Homes, and Communities
The purpose of this study is to investigate how to develop science after school programs that support the deep and meaningful STEM engagement of girls of color. This project will focus on how to empirically test design features in a research practice partnership with a local school.
Participation in a Video Club: Influences on Teachers and Teaching, Students and Learning
This study investigates the critical discourses developed by high school science teachers engaged in a semester-long video club professional development series. The focus of the video club was to enhance participants’ abilities to facilitate students’ thinking and reasoning in science.
Appropriating and Enacting Literacy Teaching Practices in the Context of the Pathway Project Professional Development Program
In this study, I investigate the types of pedagogical tools middle school English teachers take up and adapt from literacy professional development. Moreover, I am also interested in how these tools shape their own learning as well as their students’ learning. Finally, I also seek to understand cognitive and contextual factors that may influence how teachers are enacting these tools in their classrooms.
Broadening participation in mathematics for students from non-dominant backgrounds: The relationship between teacher practice, noticing and pedagogical commitments
This study draws on the construct of teacher noticing to examine how teachers attend to and reason about classroom features that influence learning opportunities for non-dominant groups. Just as research examines how teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and identities influence their practice, I use the lens of noticing to explain the cognitive processes teachers use engaging in these teaching practices. Through this work, I seek to make explicit the noticing of secondary mathematics teachers and the relationship between their noticing, practices and pedagogical commitments.
Physical Therapist Students’ Clinical Reasoning and Characterizations of Practice
This study investigates how doctor of physical therapy students engage in clinical problem solving. Specifically, I examine the types of problems students frame and solve during an encounter with a patient and how their perspectives on practice influence their clinical decision making.
A Model of Professional Development for Field-Based Teacher Educators: Addressing Historical Problems Through Local Collaboration
This dissertation examines a professional development intervention that brought together university supervisors of student teaching with partner classroom mentor teachers to develop a shared vision of mathematics instruction and shared approaches to mentoring pre-service teachers in the field. The study contributes to practice-based teacher education by offering a model design university-school collaborations aimed at supporting pre-service teachers in connecting learning across university and field site settings.
A Longitudinal Investigation of Beginning Teachers’ Conceptions and Enactments of Equity-Minded Mathematics Practices
This study examines the factors that impact the retention and attrition of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school teachers and support or impede their development and implementation of reform-based, equity-minded mathematics practices.
Learning Affordances for Teachers and Students in a Summer Lab School
I examine an alternative teacher certification program aimed at preparing primarily Latinx and African American teacher candidates for instruction in segregated urban schools. In this project I work closely with first year teachers as they prepare and begin teaching in their own classroom to identify ways of improving urban science teacher preparation and opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with and learn science.