School of Education Professor Wins Prestigious NSF Grant
9/29/2008 |
| Laurie Rubel |
Brooklyn College assistant professor Laurie Rubel has won a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award for $625,137 over five years. The award is among the federally-funded foundation’s most distinguished, and supports junior faculty members who demonstrate leadership as teacher-scholars.
“This is a big one,” said Rubel, who has taught in the School of Education’s mathematics education program for the last five years. “It will allow me to build on some of the research I have already been doing.”
She will use the grant for a project called Teacher Learning Communities: Centering the Teaching of Mathematics on Urban Youth. She plans to work with teachers from four different local high schools to develop culturally relevant math pedagogy and then plans to conduct research on how effective their approach is with students. She will start the project at the Bushwick School for Social Justice and the Performing Arts and Technology High School, both in Brooklyn.
Rubel -- who taught high school math for nine years in New York City and Tel Aviv before completing her Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University -- already worked on what will essentially come to be the pilot program for the grant. She has been working with about 20 School of Education alumni on developing math pedagogy. However, the teachers taught at a variety of different schools and it has been hard for her to track any progress in students.
“I haven’t had any real research sense of what happens with the teachers or the kids,” she said. “This grant will allow me to watch and see how it plays out.”
Rubel won a Young Scholar fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation in 2006 to conduct research on mathematics education for urban students, specifically on how to include aspects of the students’ lives as contexts for themes that can be analyzed mathematically.
