Carrie Tzou is a professor in science education in the School of Educational Studies and a PI in the Goodlad Institute. She holds a PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and an M.S. in Teaching and Learning with a concentration in science education from Vanderbilt University. Her research has three major components, all connected with an interest in addressing issues of culture, identity, and equity in science and environmental science learning: 1) ethnographic work to understand how youth and their communities are positioned and position themselves through place-based education, 2) design-based research to design curricula to bring youths’ out of school science and cultural practices into science and environmental science teaching and learning, and 3) research and design of elementary and secondary preservice teacher education that explores how to orient preservice teachers to the sophisticated learning and identities that their students construct both in and out of school in order to make science more accessible to all of their students.
