Ilana Horn

I center my research on ways to make authentic mathematics accessible to students, particularly those who have been historically marginalized by our educational system. I focus primarily on mathematics teaching in two ways. First, I look at classroom practices that engage the most students in high quality mathematics. Second, viewing teaching as a contextually-embedded practice, I am interested in how school environments, communities, colleagues, and policies shape what is instructionally possible. All of this is unified through a pursuit to understand teacher learning as a situative phenomenon. In these ways, my scholarship lies at the intersection of mathematics education, learning sciences, and sociology of teachers' work.

My research projects have spanned questions of in-service teachers' professional learning, pre-service education, district level instructional improvement, and students' experiences of different forms of mathematics instruction. These projects implicate the way teachers' work is organized in supporting the best forms of instruction for students. Theoretically, I draw on ethnomethodology and sociocultural studies of learning. Methodologically, I conduct comparative case studies, using discourse analysis as a tool to understand local meanings.