Kathryn Kirchgasler

Katie Kirchgasler is Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is affiliated with the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program, and Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies.

Her research investigates how education reforms today inadvertently build on legacies of segregated and colonial schooling. She examines taken-for-granted practices of educational research and pedagogy that divide and order students, their families, and communities onto hierarchies of being, knowing, and feeling. Her studies use historicizing and ethnographic approaches to explore how current efforts to include all students rely on inherited practices that create new forms of exclusion and demands for assimilation.

Katie’s scholarship appears in the Teachers College Record, Science Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Paedagogica Historica, and Curriculum Inquiry. She has received a Research Development Award from the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation and given an invited keynote for the International Organization for Science and Technology Education. She serves on the Leadership Council of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice, and is currently a co-coordinator for the Cultural, Social, and Gender Issues strand of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching.

She teaches graduate and undergraduate seminars that explore post/de/anticolonial studies, raciolinguistic perspectives, and Science & Technology Studies. As a teacher educator, she aims to support pre-service teachers in questioning standardized norms, dismantling raciolinguistic hierarchies, and interweaving principles of culturally relevant and justice-centered pedagogies. She previously taught science at an East Boston middle school and as a Fulbright teaching assistant at a bilingual primary school in Spain.

Katie enjoys working with interdisciplinary graduate students interested in questions of power, racialization, and coloniality across areas, including science, mathematics, environmental, health, early childhood, bilingual, multicultural, and teacher education.