Dr. Tesha Sengupta-Irving’s research concerns 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 who racially minoritized youth are and are becoming. She holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University.
