Associate Professor of the Practice of Science Education

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I am a science teacher educator in the secondary education licensure program and teacher education researcher in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

As faculty of practice, I have built partnerships along the continuum of practice, from preservice to veteran teachers. This allows me to design models and opportunities for teachers to talk about science and science teaching as a platform for their development, facilitating a shift from traditional science teaching and learning toward visions of reform. In particular, I explore teacher discourse around science and ambitious science teaching as well as ways to support this discourse outside the classroom to facilitate change inside the classroom. More specifically, I explore two questions. First, how do teachers talk about their teaching practice? Second, how can learning opportunities be designed to help teachers engage in productive discourse that will facilitate a change in their teaching practice? Because I work with preservice and inservice teachers, I have enacted my research questions as tentative hypotheses for constructive action and as critical questions for disciplined inquiry.

I am involved in a couple of projects that help me explore these questions in more depth. As PI of an NSF-funded Noyce Scholarship Program, entitled Mobilizing STEM Talent for STEM Teaching, I am working toward recruiting more diverse perspectives in our conversations about science teaching and learning. And, as a co-investigator on a project with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I am working with multiple partners in thinking about how video-based interactions with accomplished teacher practice can be used to support novice teacher learning about their own practice. More information about these projects is included here.