Things you don't yet know about Katie | W2 Introductions | Discussion

Hi, cohort!

Most of you know the basics about me by now, so I’m going to try to make this interesting by adding adding some detail that may or may not be irrelevant.

I grew up in Zilwaukee, Michigan, a tiny town about 90 minutes from East Lansing. The story behind the town’s name is that the founders deliberately chose it to sound similar to Milwaukee, hoping to lure new residents there. It didn’t work. The population has never risen above 2,000 people. It’s small enough to not have a middle or high school, so I did most of my schooling in nearby Saginaw, Michigan. So even though I technically grew up in a small town, I did not really have a small town experience.

I did my BA at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, majoring in math and minoring in psychology. I didn’t think I was interested in education at the time, but toward the end of my time at WMU I got interested in issues of gender equity in mathematics, and that set me on a path that led me first to Northwestern to do an MA in Learning Sciences and then to 10 years of work in curriculum development. My favorite part of my job at the University of Chicago was field testing lessons in elementary classrooms. I particular like retelling the following exchange I overheard between a teacher and a first grader one time:
Teacher: How did you add the numbers?
Student: 17!
T: Not just the answer — what tools did you use to help you?
S: A cake!
T: How can a cake help you add numbers?
S: I could write a number on it.

Exchanges like that (they were not always quite so silly) got me really interested in kids’ thinking, and the picture got even more interesting when kids started interacting with digital tools. I came to MSU to investigate how technology can most productively be used in elementary mathematics education. Popular views on technology in classrooms, especially with young kids, have tended to be polarized, in my experience. Tech is either touted as the solution to all problems or denounced as a waste of money or a method for rotting kids’ brains. One of my goals for the future, that this PhD is a step toward, is becoming a voice for more nuanced takes of what works and what doesn’t and why. Generally I think that tech has enormous potential for stimulating thinking, but thus far the education and research field has little idea of how to unlock that potential.

Two things related to this course that interest me are:
1. Better understanding the reciprocal relationship between ed psych and ed tech, and
2. Learning more about how to effectively carry out design-based research.