December Lectures: A new online series connecting the DBR community
Starting in December 2024, the interdisciplinary DBR-Network in collaboration with EDeR are organizing the December Lectures series. This is an open series of online lectures by researchers who work on topcis relevant for Design-Based Research / Educational Design Research.
Details (Date, meeting link) will be shared her in due time.
If you are interested in offering a lecture yoursel, please contact the EDeR editorial office (tobias.jenert@upb.de)
Title:
How Graphs Work: A Design-Based Approach to Cultivate Community Among Introductory Undergraduate Mathematics Instructors
Presenter:
Heather Lynn Johnson, University of Colorado Denver
Abstract
In U.S. postsecondary education, there is a need to transform instruction in introductory mathematics courses (i.e., courses serving as prerequisites for Calculus and/or degree requirements for broad range of majors). An intractable problem has been an underemphasis on reasoning and exploration and an overemphasis on answer finding and procedural skills. Through a a U.S. National Science Foundation funded intervention, I have led a response to this problem: Leverage freely available digital resources, “techtivities,” focused on the cross-cutting topics of functions and graphs, to promote students’ reasoning and to disrupt “business as usual” practices. Introductory mathematics instructors across three postsecondary institutions have created community around the techtivities. At each institution, instructional leaders were key to sustaining the community, because those leaders were positioned as local experts in their own cultures and contexts. The next step is to scale up across more institutions, to broaden the community. I describe design and progress to date, then share an instructional leader model, developed to cultivate community within and across institutions. The theory of change underlying the model networks community of practice and organizational theory. I conclude with implications for turning to design to scale up promising interventions.
