This project seeks to address racism in physics by building knowledge about the spatiality of injustice in physics teaching and learning environments – how racism gets inscribed in space, including the physical layout of the classroom, the policies and practices that shape instructional approaches and student-teacher interactions, and the ways students and faculty think about and are allowed to "take up" or inhabit space. Spatiality is an often-ignored dimension in justice work, which more often attends to historical and sociological dimensions. The spatiality of injustice focuses on how injustice can be embedded in space. The overall goal of this project is to support physics instructors, students, and researchers to build an awareness of how racism shapes physics teaching and learning spaces to transform how the discipline is taught in higher education.

Learning Assistants (LAs) have been shown to effectively support active, student-centered instruction in introductory physics courses. This project aims to develop a model for training LAs to effectively elicit and build on students' science ideas, preparing them to respond to students' diverse ideas about science. The overall goal of this project is to train LAs toward promoting equity by helping students learn physics better and connect physics to their life experiences. To improve the LA professional development, we take multiple approaches. Frist, investigate the fruitful ideas that LAs use to think about teaching and learning, and communicate these through a set of LA "personas" that characterize the common assets, goals, concerns, and values that LAs have for teaching. Second, develop and test effective instructional materials for LA pedagogy courses. Third, and finally, is to amplify diverse LA voices by recruiting and supporting LAs from diverse backgrounds to participate in the LA programs that the project develops and studies. 

This project explores the similarities and differences in the scientific practices incorporated into introductory laboratory courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. We are interested in how students and instructors value scientific practices that are perceived as more technical or more social (e.g analyzing data versus communicating information). We seek to understand how students engage with specific scientific practices in biology, chemistry, and physics laboratory courses and how that engagement is encouraged and rewarded. The findings from this project support laboratory instructions toward being more equitable and supportive of a greater diversity of learners.

Physics education research (PER) has extensively studied student ideas about a physics concept/topic. This project draws extensively on conceptual resources theory to identify students' productive ideas that are continuous to canonical physics. These ideas might derive from their physical or sensory experience and are activated in a context-sensitive way. The findings of this work support development of instructional materials that elicit students' productive ideas and build on these ideas toward sophisticated understanding. 

Our definitions of equity inform how we identify inequity and take transformative action. This project adopts Gutiérrez's equity framework from mathematics education research to study how physics teachers conceptualize equity in their practice. The framework defines equity in terms of four dimensions: Access, Achievement, Identity, and Power. Using this framework as our analysis lens, we are interested in understanding which aspects of equity are dominated or diminished in physics practices and educational discourse. The findings of this work support educators to reflect upon their practices and brainstorm more equitable, culturally-responsive, and socially-just physics instructions.

Faculty often engage in long-term professional development activities, continually learning and applying various innovations to their teaching practices. We take an asset-based and agentic approach to explore faculty experiences with ongoing processes of change. We are interested in identifying supportive factors or challenges they encounter as they make changes. The findings of this project can support the design of environments to better center faculty needs and the reality of their professional development.

Personas are life-like characters that are driven by potential or real users’ personal goals and experiences when interacting with a product. Built to support a user-centered design in human-interface contexts, personas have features that can help address design problems in educational contexts as well. This project proposes a six-step process of building personas using phenomenographic study as follows: articulate a design problem, collect user data, assemble phenomenographic categories, build personas, check personas, and solve the design problem using personas. We applied this method to design two sets of personas to help the redesign of a professional development website and a undergraduate research program design.