Current Projects

This four-year NSF-funded project (2024-2028) enacts and researches a teacher professional development program, “Teaching for the Anthropocene,” with middle and high school science teachers that brings a concept of "critical systems thinking." The project investigates how critical systems thinking may enhance teachers’ understanding of socio-environmental issues and support them to integrate those understandings into their curriculum and teaching. The project also identifies potential challenges educators may face as well as what local conditions and program supports help them practically apply critical systems thinking in their classrooms.

PAST Projects

In this double special issue of Professional Development in Education, I co-curated 22 articles investigating aspects of teacher development from complex lenses, including cultural historical activity theory, complexity theory, actor-network theory, indigenous perspectives, rhizomatics, posthumanism, affect theory, and new materialisms. The issue is the first of its kind in the area of teacher development, and aims to foster expansive, relational, multiplistic thinking that can better support teachers, and ultimately, contribute to mediating long-standing inequities in education.

In collaboration with Kara Viesca, I developed a framework to help demonstrate conceptual shifts needed to move away from simplistic conceptualizations of teaching activity and toward more complex perspectives. To tackle this task, we offer a set of conceptual shifts that, together, offer a set of theoretical tools to (re)think the processes of, and connections between, teacher learning and practice in ways that better account for the dynamic, multiplicitous, ever-shifting nature of these activities. Currently, we are adapting this framework into an analytic tool that can be used by a range of educational professionals and scholars.