Jasmine Y Ma

New York University | NYU · Department of Teaching and Learning

Circulating public discourses about mathematics and mathematics learning shape how families and students make sense of their experiences with schooling. In the United States, these discourses can play a large role in how public education policy is developed due to the commitment of public school boards to hearing community voices as well as a recen...

In this article, we report on a video-based field study of an intergenerational family’s enactment of a mathematical object (a torus) in the context of an immersive mathematics exhibition in a science center. To do this, we center interwoven, multi-party mobilities at multiple scales–walking, gesturing, touching, and postural adjustments – as key a...

This article reports on a learning community that requires acting together in order to perform and to learn, an organization of shared activity across people and through time that we call ensemble learning. We present a descriptive analysis of ensemble learning in a high school marching band performance season, following how “The Show” was designed...

We present a video-based study of family visits to Taping Shape, an immersive exhibition that allows visitors to explore the inside of geometric objects. The exhibition was designed to support embodied sense-making, intimacy, and material encounter with mathematical objects. This study builds on research on walking and movement as forms of place- a...

This study examines the consequences of whole-body, multi-party activity for mathematics learning, both in and out of the classroom. We develop a theoretical framework that brings together contemporary theories related to social space, embodied cognition, and mathematical activity. Then, drawing on micro-ethnographic and case-comparative techniques...

This study interrogates the contributions of multi-party, whole-body interactions to students' collaboration and negotiation of mathematics ideas in a task setting called walking scale geometry, where bodies in interaction became complex resources for students' emerging goals in problem solving. Whole bodies took up overlapping roles representing g...

The interaction analysis presented by Kim and Roth examines nine students, their teachers, the learning task and materials in a mixed second and third grade science classroom during the school day. In the research narrative readers are introduced to two resourceful and creative groups of students as they work on a task assigned by their teacher—to...

This paper explores an alternative strategy for designing hybrid instructional environments. Rather than bridging home or community funds of knowledge with school learning, I propose designing disruptions to typical school practices to invite students to recruit out-of-school resources meaningful and sensible to them in order to grapple with school...

Drawing on an ethnographic study of skateboarders, we examine how learning occurs in two city skateparks. We consider the dialectical relationship between participants’ activity and setting, or individually experienced spaces of the skateparks. Individuals edit these settings in activity, even as activity generates setting, and space is socially pr...

The papers in this symposium explore the concept of disruptions as an analytical concept for investigating how individual learning and changes in local practice mutually influence each other in designed learning contexts. Disruptions are rearrangements, temporary or sustained, of typical practice, meaningfully experienced by participants. The paper...

This paper describes findings from part of a design experiment where a particular designed setting for large scale geometry tasks using bodies and everyday materials "drawing on the ground" was explored through the theoretical lens of hybridity by way of disruptions, conceptual agency, and the recruitment of novel resources. Findings, based on meth...

This classroom narrative proposes a process for reinventing academic research and writing in secondary schools for the 21st Century. We build on Macrorie's (1988) I-Search paper, drawing on affordances of Web 2.0 technologies and culture, to initiate the iSearch 2.0 process. iSearch 2.0 consists of four phases: 1) messing about and trying on questi...

Starting from the assertion that traditional and reform mathematics pedagogy constitute two distinct figured worlds of teaching and learning, the authors explore the initiation of prospective teachers into the figured world of reform mathematics pedagogy. To become successful teachers in reform-oriented classrooms, prospective teachers must learn m...

In this paper we report from a study of a group of physical anthropologists, focusing on joint activity by the group's faculty leader (Tom) and one of his advanced graduate students (Wanda) as they worked to "ground truth" a model of colonial succession by walking through a settlement they were excavating in the highlands of Peru. In this and other...

This article examines how conversations during design reviews in which 8th-grade mathematics students shared population models with visiting specialists expanded the disciplinary expertise of the classroom. Re-contextualizing is a conversational exchange that visiting specialists initiated to invite groups to consider their models in novel contexts...