About

As a scholar in mathematics education, I am deeply interested and committed to the teaching and learning of mathematics and how, in turn, activity and discourse may well support student learning in ways that reflect identity development and build on individuals’ everyday experiences. 

I am a sociocultural theorist concerned with the interplay of cognition with cultural tools and representations. Consistent with a sociopolitical perspective (Gutiérrez, 2013; Nasir & McKinney de Royston, 2013), my commitment to investigate cognition and instruction across ages and grades is driven by a desire to broaden access to all students to important mathematical ideas, particularly for children from historically minoritized communities.  

With this perspective, my work seeks to contribute to rehumanizing STEM areas and individuals’ learning experiences such that individuals can, broadly speaking, ask and answer questions about their own worlds, with one’s own world having local and cultural meaning. In seeing one’s own world, disciplinary tools, including physical tools and written representations that have conventional, accepted meanings, mediate meaning and support learning. This commitment has led me to develop strands of research that I organize here in two overarching themes: the role of representations in thinking and learning together with the importance of everyday experiences and identity in learning. Each theme is framed through the sociocultural contexts and activity structures of the populations that are a part of my research.  

I am a professor in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Growing up in Quincy and Boston, MA, I saw my parents earn their GEDs and then move on to postsecondary studies, emphasizing the role education plays.  Yet by the time I began my own undergraduate studies, I knew so little about time management that I found I constantly missed assignment due dates and found I was always doing things at the last minute, making me feel like I somehow didn’t have what it takes to do well in college.  Such experiences have informed my eventual work in time literacy.