Research Agenda

My research agenda centers on disrupting dominant, exclusionary systems of exclusion in mathematics education (Adiredja & Louie, 2020; Louie, 2017). Because teachers serve as gatekeepers or gateways to students’ mathematical futures, my research agenda is primarily focused on the ways teachers support, and are supported in, the cultivation of these equitable, humanizing learning spaces. There are three interconnected strands guide my scholarship: (1) Critically Conscious Mathematics Teacher Educators, (2) Equity-Oriented Project-Based Learning, and (3) Humanizing Pedagogies and Countering Deficit Discourses. 

Critically Conscious Mathematics Teacher Educators

The first strand of my research centers on investigating the work of mathematics teacher educators—including mentor teachers. Mathematics teacher educators play a key role in guiding prospective teachers in developing critical consciousness around race, power, and justice in mathematics classrooms. This work builds on the premise that mathematics teacher educators play a vital role in preparing future teachers to navigate and disrupt the sociopolitical forces that shape mathematics education. This includes:

  • Investigating how mentor teachers collaborate with students and families to enact critically conscious mathematics mentoring and challenge the dominant, exclusionary systems of mathematics classrooms.

  • Examining how university-based mathematics teacher educators’ engage in activism through their research, teaching, service, and mentoring.

  • Theorizing and investigating how co-constructing learning communities can support mathematics teacher educators to create more humanizing and antiracist spaces in teacher education.

Equity-Oriented Project-Based Learning

The second strand of my research explores how equity-oriented Project-Based Learning (PBL) can serve as a structural tool for designing mathematics learning experiences that connect with students' lives, communities, and societal issues. This work positions PBL not only as an instructional approach, but as a framework for organizing discipline-rich mathematics instruction in ways that support justice-oriented learning. Along with collaborators, I have conceptualized a framework for equitable, discipline-rich PBL that balances content standards, disciplinary practices, and elements of PBL to create meaningful learning experiences. . My work also highlights how collaborative, interdisciplinary PBL projects can transform mathematics classrooms into sites where students challenge the dominant systems of exclusion. Across these projects, I leverage PBL as a vehicle for making mathematics more humanizing, relevant, and justice-oriented. 

Humanizing Pedagogies and Countering Deficit Discourses

The third strand of my research focuses on developing humanizing pedagogies that counter deficit discourses by centering students' experiences, knowledge, and strengths—while also engaging families and communities as partners in learning. This work is grounded in the belief that countering deficit discourses requires not only shifting the narratives we tell about students, but also reconfiguring the power dynamics of classrooms and rethinking whose knowledge is valued in mathematics learning. In this work, I explore how mathematics classrooms can become spaces that honor students' identities and lived experiences, particularly for communities historically marginalized by mathematics education. This includes:

  • Supporting prospective teachers to notice student strengths and use students' ideas as the foundation for instruction

  • Investigating the ways prospective teachers elicit student thinking as a way to center students’ mathematical ideas in the classroom

  • Creating opportunities for families and caregivers to share their mathematical and community knowledge with prospective teachers as a way to co-construct learning experiences.

  • Attending to the tensions between imagined and enacted humanizing pedagogies—considering how educators' commitments to justice-oriented teaching can be constrained or transformed in the reality of classrooms