LSRI Speaker Series presents Dr. Phillip A. Boda, University of Illinois at Chicago

Leaders in the field from UIC and across the nation visit LSRI throughout the year to share their research and visions. The series is free and many are open to the public. This is a hybrid event, in person with social distancing and concurrent via Zoom (registration required).

Speaker
Phillip A. Boda, UIC LSRI Talk, Department of Special Education, Bridge-to-Faculty Scholar

Title
Dreaming of Disobedient Designs and Liberatory Grammars in the Learning Sciences

Abstract
The primacy of my work rests in exploring the support needs of teachers and students that exist at the margins of schooling and society; however, such work is often peripheral to the power invested in sustaining disciplinary learning foci among design research projects. Drawing from multiple research-practice partnerships over the past five years, this talk provides a glimpse into the negotiations and tensions that arise and are at work during design-based research investigations, as well as when discussing analytic results with education stakeholders at various levels. Three projects will be highlighted: (1) Designing for reform-minded science instruction; (2) Designing for more liberatory grammars of learning that leverage the power of context-specific learning; and (3) Preambles to design driven by explorations of district data that, when not treated appropriately, envelope statistical estimations with a thin veneer that leads to biased conclusions. Implications of this work suggest greater attendance to our roles as researchers to warmly “push” our partners to envision educational possibility beyond “what is,” as well as problematize current approaches to non-experimental group analyses often carrying a selection bias that demands weighted adjustment.

Bio
Phillip is a Bridge-to-the-Faculty scholar in the special education department at UIC. He received his PhD from Teachers College at Columbia University in Science Education and previously worked as a Postdoc at Stanford with Bryan Brown, as well as at UC-Berkeley with Marcia Linn. He currently holds an NSF Fellowship at the University of Chicago mentored by Guanglei Hong and is a consult on an NSF grant to develop, refine and measure the impact of a framework to support teachers across disciplines to infuse computational thinking in curriculum and pedagogy. His work leverages critical pedagogy, intersectionality, and disability studies as lenses to de-center the normative grammars of school-based research, thus dreaming of “what if.”