Kathryn j. strom
CRITICAL COMPLEXITY | TEACHER LEARNING | EDUCATION
Professor, California State University, East Bay | Honorary Professor, University College London
My scholarship examines teaching and learning as complex phenomena that are co-produced by not just people, but also histories, politics and power, institutional structures and cultures, sociocultural conditions, and materialities. This work requires critical, relational ways of thinking that challenge the linear and reductionist logics that continue to shape educational research and practice. My current research extends this agenda into the Anthropocene, asking how educators and young people can develop the complex ways of thinking needed to understand and act within a rapidly changing, increasingly interdependent world.
Teaching for the Anthropocene
NSF DRK-12 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Collaborative research on teacher learning and critical systems thinking for socioenvironmental issues
Scaffolding the language of power
DOCTORAL LEARNING AND SCHOLARLY WRITING
An assets-based apprenticeship in doctoral writing, now adopted by 20+ doctoral programs and expanded into a commissioned book series.
CRITICAL COMPLEXITY FIELD BUILDING
INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP
Through publications, edited collections, network-building, mentoring, and professional associations, I have helped carve out scholarly and collegial spaces for critical complexity and critical posthuman scholarship in the field of education.
selected scholarship
Toward a Complex Conceptualization of Teacher Learning-Practice
Strom, K. & Viesca, K. M. (2021), Professional Development in Education
Develops a critical-complex framework for understanding teacher learning and practice as relational, situated, and co-produced rather than as a linear process of transferring learning into classroom action.
Teaching as Assemblage: Negotiating Learning and Practice in the First Year of Teaching
Strom, K. J. (2015), Journal of Teacher Education
Introduces a relational, non-linear account of teaching as collectively produced through interactions among teachers, students, institutional conditions, materialities, and other elements of the classroom system.
Toward a Critical Posthuman Understanding of Teacher Development
Strom, K. & Martin, A. (2022), Teaching and Teacher Education
Extends my earlier complexity work into a critical posthuman account of teacher development, foregrounding relationality, distributed agency, materiality, power, and difference.
Beyond the Theory-Practice Divide: A Systems Analysis of Beginning Teacher Learning-Practice Through Complex Theoretical Frameworks
Strom, K., Salvador-Garcia, C., Ervin, J., Zhang, M., Ozuna, A., & Viesca, K. (2026), Professional Development in Education
Synthesizes research on beginning teacher learning-practice across nested systems, showing how practice emerges through interactions among teachers, mentors, classrooms, schools, policy contexts, and sociocultural-political conditions.
Improving Content Teaching for Multilingual Students via Complex Theoretical Understandings of Teacher Learning-Practice
Viesca, K. M., Strom, K., Hammer, S., Masterson, J., Linzell, C., Mitchell-McCollough, J., & Flynn, F. (2019), Review of Research in Education
Applies complex perspectives on teacher learning-practice to the preparation and professional learning of teachers working with multilingual students, connecting relational understandings of teaching with questions of educational equity.