Tesha Sengupta-Irving focuses her research on the sociocultural, disciplinary, and political dimensions of children’s learning and identity work. Broadly, her research asks a deceptively simple question: What, in addition to mathematics, do children learn when they learn mathematics? Her work advances design principles and pedagogical approaches that promote racially minoritized children’s fluency in disciplinary ideas and practices, while also safeguarding their sense of joy, agency, and collectivity. Through a mix of prolonged ethnographic study, teaching experiments, and microanalyses of children’s interactions, her work generates new knowledge for disciplinary teaching and learning that centers on who racially minoritized youth are and are becoming. She holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a doctorate in curriculum and teacher education from Stanford University.
For more insights on the role of math in ensuring educational equity, subscribe to Just Equations’ newsletter.