About
David Stroupe Ph.D.
David Stroupe is an associate professor of teacher education, STEM education, and the learning sciences at the University of Utah. He also serves as the Director of Research at the Usable STEM Research and Practice Hub. He has three overlapping areas of research interests anchored around ambitious and equitable teaching.
First, he frames classrooms as science practice communities. Using lenses from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), he examines how teachers and students disrupt epistemic injustice through the negotiation of power, knowledge, and epistemic agency.
Second, he examines how beginning teachers learn from practice in and across their varied contexts. Third, he studies how teacher preparation programs can provide support and opportunities for beginning teachers to learn from practice.
David has a background in biology and taught secondary life science for four years. David is the recipient of the Exemplary Research Award for the American Educational Association's Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education), the Early Career Research Award from the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, and the Gloria J. Ladson-Billings Outstanding Book Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He currently is an incoming Co-Editor of the Journal Science Education.
Team
Megan Walser is a PhD student in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education. Their research follows two related strands: understanding and supporting justice-oriented approaches to science teaching, and moving towards justice-oriented assessments.
They currently teach secondary science teaching methods courses, and see their research as deeply connected to informing their practice. They also work on the NSF-funded Moth Education ("MothEd") project, supporting elementary and middle school teachers in doing authentic, community-based science with their students.
Matt Adams is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Michigan State University. His dissertation studies how meaning making can be used to support novice teachers in engaging in social justice science teaching early on in their career. Matt and David have worked together for 5 years now on an NSF-funded Undergraduate Reseach Experience, where we investigate how science can become humanized for pre-service teachers who work as a lab technician inside of a plant physiology lab for a semester prior to their methods course. Matt has also worked on co-developing a network of like-minded, early career social justice science teachers, which involves hosting seminars, facilitating a social justice curriculum writing institute, individual and group think spaces, and running an online forum for teachers to share successes and challenges with each other.