us

About Us

staff Staff of the Chèche Konnen Center represent a wide variety of academic disciplines and traditions. The thinking and perspectives of biologists, classroom teachers, cognitive scientists, educational researchers, ethnographers, literacy researchers, mathematics education researchers, mathematics educators, physicists, science education researchers, and sociolinguists inform and enrich our research. Center staff also participate in multiple, diverse socio-cultural and language communities. Among us are individuals whose first and second languages include English, French, Haitian Creole, and Spanish. Below are short biographies of current Center staff.

Ann S. Rosebery is co-Director of the Chèche Konnen Center. Her research focuses on improving science learning and teaching for children from communities historically placed at risk in our society. A central goal of this work has been to document and characterize the range of intellectual resources that these children bring to the study of science. Currently she is collaborating with teacher researchers and Chèche Konnen staff to develop innovative pedagogical practices that enable all children to understand and use diverse sense-making resources to learn and to do science. Dr. Rosebery was a middle school teacher for eight years.

Beth Warren is co-director of the Chèche Konnen Center. For the past 13 years, in collaboration with teachers and researchers at the Center, Dr. Warren has explored and documented the rich sense-making resources that children from ethnically and linguistically diverse communities bring to the study of science. She has also collaborated on the design, development and study of an approach to teacher research that integrates teacher inquiry in science with inquiry into children’s ideas and ways with words.

Ann Butler is the Administrative Assistant for the Chèche Konnen Center. She supports the Center's work, coordinates meetings and is the contact person for general inquiries.

Carol Wright holds a BA from Lafayette College, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Carol has previously taught at Bowdoin College, Wesleyan University and has served as an Advising Dean in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Carol is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at TERC, a not-for-profit education research and development organization in Cambridge, MA where her scholarly interests focus on theoretical and empirical issues in the schooling of black Americans in urban and suburban educational environments.

Diana Nemirovsky is a research assistant for the Cheche Konnen Center and is particularly involved in the Center’s current classroom-based research and teacher development project. She recently completed her undergraduate studies in international relations and worked on establishing a partnership between Tufts University and two communities of internally displaced people in Jinja, Uganda. Diana has lead reading groups for children in greater Boston and for university students at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She is interested in exploring the complex ways that language can both cultivate and thwart equity in the classroom.

Folashade Cromwell Solomon is a researcher for the Chèche Konnen Center. She is currently conducting classroom-based research in early elementary classrooms. Before coming to TERC, Folashade was a third grade teacher at Young Achievers Science and Mathematics Pilot School in Boston and at Happy Hollow School in Wayland, Massachusetts. During her time as a teacher, she served on various school-wide initiatives and participated in on-site teacher–research groups. She also co- authored and presented a paper at the National Conference of the Coalition of Essential Schools. After seven years teaching, Folashade is now a doctoral student at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education studying how to support teachers in improving their instructional practices.

Gary R. Goldstein is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Tufts University. His physics research is in Theoretical Particle Physics. He teaches all levels of university physics courses, from Freshman Physics to Advanced Quantum Field Theory, as well as many courses for non-scientists. Prof. Goldstein is involved in science education at all levels. He has been a member of advisory boards for science exhibits, a consultant for preparing elementary level science books, and is currently a science advisor for several physics education projects, including The Fulcrum Institute, a developing on-line Masters degree course for teachers. He is a collaborator in the science education research work of Chèche Konnen. In this work he is interested in enabling students of diverse backgrounds and grade levels to make sense of the concepts, processes and practice of science.

Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes is a researcher at the Chèche Konnen Center. Her interests include language development in bilingual classrooms and science teaching in multilingual environments. She taught in a Haitian Bilingual program at the primary and middle school levels for 14 years.

Megan Bang is a post-doctoral fellow at TERC and works with Chèche Konnen Center. Dr. Bang’s work is broadly focused on carefully understanding the relationships between the intellectual resources and traditions of children and families from diverse communities and dominant academic literacies and traditions. The goals of her work are to uncover, recover, and discover teaching and learning practices in ways that open problem solving space for both the communities from which children come and the disciplines themselves. Dr. Bang focuses on science teaching and learning in Native American communities both in and out of school.