STEM Education Seminar Series | Department of Teaching & Learning
The STEM Education Seminar Series aims to foster connections and conversations between the DTL community and scholars conducting research in STEM education. Every month, guest speakers are invited to present insights from their latest research in these seminars.
Please add the dates below to your calendars and check back soon for more information.
- Where: Hybrid – Wyatt 201 & Zoom
- When: Monthly on Fridays, 12-1:30 pm CT. Lunch will be served to in-person attendees at noon, with talks starting at 12:15 pm CT.
Fall 2023 Seminar Dates
August 25, 2023
Dr. Jasmine Ma
September 22, 2023
Dr. Nicole Louie & Chundou Her
A feast to feed thousands: Asian American cultural wealth toward justice in math education
What would it be like to treat building racial justice in math education as if it could only be done with and by marginalized students and families? This question guides our current work with Black, Latine, and Asian American middle schoolers. Two emerging themes in our work have been Asian American and particularly Hmong invisibility, and Hmong and Asian American cultural wealth. In this talk, we will discuss how these themes are shaping our use of participatory design research and their implications for others’ research and teaching.
October 27, 2023
Dr. Daniel Morales-Doyle
Teacher Solidarity Co-Design for Transdisciplinary Professional Learning
Over the last decade, the priorities for learning in science classes and in the professional education of teachers have undergone parallel shifts to prioritize the development of practices. Scholars have argued that the elevation of practices creates openings for advancing equity in science education. In contrast, some have argued that overemphasizing core practices in teacher education pushes issues of equity and justice to the margins. These tensions are elucidated through the work of a collective of high school science teachers, community organizers, youth, and university-based scientists and teacher educators. Within the context of this collective, this talk shares two studies that began with the broad question: what kind of professional learning supports in-service science teachers to facilitate classroom projects using Youth Participatory Science (YPS) to address environmental racism? The first study describes how teachers learned to consider critiques of the scientific enterprise while designing curriculum for YPS projects. Through teacher-solidarity co-design (Philip et al, 2022), the second study documents an expansive shift towards prioritizing historical context and argues for a redefinition of the relationships between educational research and teacher professional learning. The implications of this work include new models for co-constructing professional learning agendas with teachers and others involved in campaigns for educational justice.
November 17, 2023
Dr. Fikile Nxumalo, Associate Professor OISE
RSVP for In-Person Attendees (Wyatt 050-3 from 12-1:30 )
Thinking with Black ecologies as pedagogical and research orientations 
Black ecologies are filled with possibilities as research and pedagogical modes of inquiring into Black people’s relations with the more-than-human world, in particular spaces and places. Black ecologies attend to, resist and subvert the ways in which these relations have been and continue to be impacted by anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, including their interconnections. In this talk I illustrate possibilities for disrupting anti-Blackness in environmental education research and practice by thinking with Black ecologies. I focus on the potentials of orientations towards Black relations with the more-than-human world that center relationality, reciprocity and futurity.