International Conference of the Learning Sciences

Keynote Speakers for ICLS 2014

Keynotes

Panel Keynote

View Speaker Bios

Schedule at a Glance

Download the full program schedule here.

Welcome Session for New Members

ICLS 2014 Invited Sessions

Speaker Bios

Jean Lave is a social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory. Much of her ethnographically-based research concentrates on the re-conceiving of learning, learners, and everyday life in terms of social practice. She has published three books on the subject: Understanding Practice (co-authored with S. Chaiklin, 1993); Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (with E. Wenger, 1991); and Cognition in Practice (1988). More recently her work has taken a historical turn with a collaborative, ethnohistorical research project, Producing Families, Trading in History on the British merchant families engaged in the port wine trade in Portugal – (History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities 2000, edited with Dorothy Holland). She finished a book on apprenticeship in Liberia and changing research practice (Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice) in 2011 and is currently finishing a book of essays, with Brazilian anthropologist Ana Gomes, to accompany and reflect on Situated Learning. She retired from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006.<.

Rogers Hall is a learning scientist interested the development, learning, and teaching of STEM conceptual practices that are centrally important in scientific and technical work and that appear (in varied form) as topics and resources in school. His research follows these conceptual practices in and out of school, asking how they are organized, develop through time, and can be designed. A central component of this research asks how conceptual practices are learned and change “in the wild” (e.g., ethnographic studies of work groups in field biology, architecture, urban planning, or archeology). Based on comparative analysis in these studies, Hall and colleagues design and study experimental teaching both in conventional classrooms and linked, community settings. Selected publications include “Counter-mapping the neighborhood on bicycles: Mobilizing youth to reimagine the city” (with K. Taylor), “Talk and conceptual change at work” (with I. Horn), “Modalities of engagement in mathematical activity and learning” (with R. Nemirovsky), "How does cognition get distributed? Case studies of making concepts general in technical and scientific work" (with K. Wieckert and K. Wright), and "Conceptual learning" (with J. Greeno). Hall currently serves as Editor in Chief of the journal, Cognition and Instruction.

Megan Bang is an assistant professor of the Learning Sciences and Human Development in Educational Psychology at the University of Washington. She also teaches in the secondary teacher education program. She is the former Director of Education at the American Indian Center (AIC), where she served in this role for 12 years. She is a former pre-school, high-school, and GED teacher, youth worker, and museum educator. Megan’s research is focused on improving the well-being and educational opportunities for youth, families and communities historically disadvantaged by education, with a specific focus on Indigenous communities. She investigates the dynamics of culture, learning, and development in and across the multiple contexts of children’s lives. She has been centrally focused on understanding and supporting the complexities of learners navigation of multiple meaning systems in science learning environments. She has worked to understand cross-cultural differences in meaning making about the natural world (both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems) and how learning in places unfolds. Through community-based methodologies Dr. Bang is working to build community capacity to improve and transform teaching and learning, revitalize culture, language and community well-being, and ensure more Indigenous people are engaged in critical research endeavors.

Paul Cobb is Professor of Mathematics Education at Vanderbilt University. His current research focuses on improving the quality of mathematics teaching and thus student learning on a large scale, and on issues of equity in students’ access to significant mathematical ideas. He received the Hans Freudenthal Medal for a cumulative research program over the prior ten years from the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction in 2005, and the Sylvia Scribner Award from the American Educational Research Association in 2010. He is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Kara Jackson is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on specifying forms of practice that support all learners to participate in rigorous mathematics and how to re-organize educational contexts to support teachers to develop such forms of practice. From 2007-2010, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University on a project investigating instructional improvement in middle-grades mathematics at scale; she is currently a co-principal investigator on an extension of this study and leads lines of investigation focused on achieving equity in opportunities to learn mathematics and the coordination of professional learning across role groups and contexts. In 2007, she received her doctorate in Education, Culture, and Society with an emphasis in mathematics education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She taught high-school mathematics in Vanuatu as a Peace Corps volunteer and was a mathematics specialist, supporting both youth and adults, for the Say Yes to Education Foundation in Philadelphia.

Michael Sorum serves as a Deputy Superintendent for the Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD). He oversees the Divisions of Teaching and Learning, School Leadership, and Student Support Services. Prior to this role, he served as the Chief Academic Officer for the FWISD and the Providence, Rhode Island School Department where he supervised academics , career and technical education, assessment and data quality, secondary academic advisement and the departments for special student populations: special education, ESL and bilingual education, and gifted education. Sorum taught French, Spanish, ESL, and Reading for ten years at the elementary and secondary levels and has served as a campus instructional guide for mathematics and a curriculum administrator. He holds degrees in political science and romance languages from L’Université d’Aix-en-Provence, and Portland State University and a master’s in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard University. His doctorate is from Texas Christian University.

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Professor at the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, where he directs the Evoke Laboratory, which explores new forms of knowledge expression. Recent positions include Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara. Together with Leigh Star he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent book is Memory Practices in the Sciences. He is currently working on big data policy and on scientific cyberinfrastructure; as well as completing a book on social readings of data and databases. More information can be found at: http://ics.uci.edu/~gbowker.

Anna Sfard conducts research and teaches in the domain of learning sciences, with particular focus on the relation between thinking and communication. In her research, she aims to contribute to our understanding of human development at large, and of the growth of mathematical thinking in particular. Her work is guided by the assumption that human thinking is a form of communication. Inspired mainly by the work of Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, this non-dualist tenet eventually leads to the conclusion that our communicational activities is the primary source of all things human. Results of her theoretical and empirical research conducted within this communicational (or “commognitive”) framework have been summarized in the monograph Thinking as communicating: Human development, the growth of discourses, and mathematizing (2008). Her other volumes, edited or co-edited, include Learning tools: Perspectives on the role of designed artifacts in mathematics learning (2002), Learning discourse: discursive approaches to research in mathematics education (2003), and Development of Mathematical discourse: Some insights from communicational research (2012).

Reed Stevens is a Professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. As an ethnographer of everyday experience, Stevens conducts field studies exploring how learning, thinking, and joint action are comparatively organized in range of socio-cultural contexts. A leading goal of these studies is to understand the ways individuals, groups, and standing cultural practices create, organize, and sustain routine and innovative activity and, in particular, how people learn together. In the past two decades he has conducted field studies spanning homes, schools, libraries, professional workplaces, and museums. He draws on understandings generated in these field studies to design and reorganize learning environments and experiences. One current project called FUSE Studios draws on a decade of informal learning studies to rethink STEM as STEAM learning and engagement, using a metaphor of ‘leveling up’ in video games. (http://vimeo.com/85162569). Other current work includes field studies of young people’s everyday experiences using and learning with media, the design and study of a family game to understand and reorganize household energy consumption, and a field study of early career engineers. He was has co-led two NSF Centers, the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE) and the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments Center (LIFE).

Leona Schauble is a cognitive developmental psychologist with research interests in scientific and mathematical reasoning. Shortly after completing her undergraduate degree, she joined the research staff for Sesame Street at the Children's Television Workshop. Her subsequent fifteen years at CTW provided practical experience in research and the design of education. In 1987, after completing a PhD in Developmental and Educational Psychology at Columbia University, she went to the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh as a postdoctoral fellow, where she continued as a Research Scientist until 1992. At the University of Wisconsin and subsequently at Vanderbilt University, she studies learning in both informal and formal educational settings. For example, with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the world’s largest children’s museum, she participated in an NSF-funded project to design and construct an 11,000-foot science gallery that reflects the science knowledge and learning of six- to ten-year-old children. Her current research, conducted in collaboration with Professor Richard Lehrer, is on the origins and development of model-based reasoning in school mathematics and science. In this project, researchers work collaboratively with teachers on an extended basis to generate reform in teaching and learning of mathematics and science, at levels from kindergarten through middle school.

Beth Warren is co-Director of the Chèche Konnen Center at TERC. Prior to joining TERC in 1990, she was Senior Scientist in the Education Group at BBN Laboratories in Cambridge, MA. In her research she focuses on understanding intersections of learning, teaching, disciplinary subject matter, and historically structured inequalities rooted in language, culture, and race. In recent work funded by NSF, the Chèche Konnen Center has been working in collaboration with the Boston Arts Academy, the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts, to design and develop an artscience model of expansive learning focused on complex, transdisciplinary phenomena such as water and the human microbiome.

Marianne Wiser received a bachelor's degree in oceanography from the University of Liege, Belgium and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been at Clark University since 1981. Dr. Wiser studies conceptual change in children, students, and the history of science. Her main topics of research are symbolic development and science learning. Current projects focus on the development of numerical knowledge and number notation in young children; the development of young children's understanding of the nature and function of printed words (pre-reading skills) and how they come to understand the alphabetic nature of our writing system; young children's ability to use models and maps; and young children's conception of matter, weight, and materials. Another topic of research is teaching and learning physics in high school, with special emphasis on microgenetic processes, mental models, parallels with history of science, and the integration of situated cognition approaches with theories of mental representations.

Jeremy Roschelle is Director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. He co-leads a group of about 80 multidisciplinary researchers who develop educational technologies, conduct learning sciences research and evaluate programs for the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Li Ka Shing Foundation and other government, philanthropic, and industry clients. Within SRI Education, he also leads projects in three lines of work: Community Building, Evaluating Products, and Digital Learning Innovation. Three running themes in his work are democratizing access to advanced mathematics, the study of collaborative learning and appropriate use of advanced or emerging technologies.