me | students | prospective students

One of the more fun, challenging, rewarding, and interesting aspects of my work is collaborating with graduate students to advance our mutual understanding of big ideas. As a result, I think it would be accurate if I listed 30-40 students here each semester, depending on my teaching load and other factors. However, that wouldn’t be entirely productive given that you are most likely interested in seeing who I am “officially” working with. Therefore, I’ll limit myself to sharing the graduate students whom I am officially mentoring below. At the same time, I am also the Faculty Advisor for the Learning Sciences Graduate Student Association (LSGSA), a site that I highly recommend you check out if you are interested in the range of backgrounds and interests of the students who are working together at IU.

Jenna McWilliams

Jenna McWilliams is a doctoral student in Indiana University’s Learning Sciences program, where her primary focus is on equity, educational policy, and the role of new media technologies in public education. Her current research projects include an ethnographic study of how collaborative technology-based projects can support preservice literacy teachers’ pedagogical growth; a design-based research initiative working with fan fiction activities in a high school English classroom; and a pilot project working with social media technologies to support culturally relevant and personally meaningful engagement with mathematics content and concepts.

Jenna blogs about education, politics, human rights, gender politics, education, and queer theory at her personal blog, making edible playdough is hegemonic (http://jennamcwilliams.com). You can see her academic cv here.

Other things Jenna has done for a living include:

  • blogger [the guardian]
  • curriculum specialist [project new media literacies]
  • outreach coordinator [project new media literacies]
  • billing coordinator [vca south shore animal hospital]
  • receptionist [vca south shore animal hospital]
  • adjunct university instructor (composition, literature, creative writing, business communications) [suffolk university, bridgewater state college, newbury college]
  • groundskeeper [city of fort collins, colorado]
  • graduate associate instructor (composition, creative writing)[colorado state university]
  • writing tutor [colorado state university writing center]
  • administrative assistant [mary crow, colorado poet laureate]
  • telephone operator [quest diagnostics]
  • reporter (sports, education, local politics)[holly herald, fenton independent, spinal column newsweekly]
  • assistant director local nonprofit [public interest research group in michigan]
  • groundskeeper [city of grand rapids, michigan]
  • used book purchaser and seller [barnes & noble]
  • cashier [meijer, inc.]
  • receptionist [dean of students office, grand valley state university]
  • fast food employee (4 hours) [mcdonald's]

David Phelps

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David Phelps is a third year Masters Student in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. For the past six years he has worked closely with young children in a variety of educational settings including a school for underprivileged children near Lima, Peru, a Reggio Emilia preschool in Burlington, Vermont, and an afterschool program facilitating discussions about topics in philosophy with elementary students in southern Indiana.

From these experiences he is interested in designing methods by which researchers and students alike can document the trajectory of their own evolving ideas and inquiries about the world. His researh question: What are the pivotal moments, within an underlying activity system, that contribute most to the healthy development of learner’s inquiries?

Currently: Working with Dr. Danish to design pedagogical activities to enrich and document young students’ robust inquiry and representation practices (and how these practices change over time and across disciplines).

Asmalina (Lina) Saleh

Asmalina (Lina) Saleh entered the Learning Sciences in order to advocate play-based, (in)formal and eAsmalina (Lina) Saleh entered the Learning Sciences in order to advocate play-based, (in)formal and equitable learning. In particular, she is interested in how symbolic play leads to learning, especially how it might increase science learning and critical thinking among young children. Additionally, she seeks to understand the intersection between play and various learning ecologies in order to gain insight into how to provide students with youth-oriented spaces, opportunities to learn and alternative learning pathways. Trained in Sociology, she is heavily influenced by critical theory and the German philosophical tradition. Her previous research includes ethnographic work with displaced islanders, prison inmates and welfare recipients in Singapore. Within the educational sector, she has designed casual games for an independent game design company and implemented educational games in classrooms. She has worked on the Quest Atlantis project, and was the project lead and main designer for a genetics curriculum designed for 4th graders. She was also on the design team for the Playable Fictions, Plague, Uganda and Epic missions in QA, which resulted in several co-authored pieces. She is currently working on expanding the BeeSign curriculum into different settings and analyzing children’s representational practices from an activity theory framework.

Joshua November 11, 2009