Leema Berland

Leema K. Berland (Ph.D. 2008, Learning Sciences, Northwestern University) is a professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Berland is broadly interested in facilitating and studying students as they engage in sensemaking practices (with a focus on K-12 students sensemaking about scientific phenomena, teacher candidates sensemaking about pedagogical phenomena, and educators making sense of their shared antiracist vision and goals). In this work, she uses sociocultural lenses to argue that engagement in sensemaking requires that learning activities be experienced by the learners as working towards a sensemaking goal, rather than as a set of disconnected procedures that satisfy an evaluative audience (i.e., a teacher, a principal, etc.). Thus, she focuses on understanding how learners interpret sensemaking opportunities, how those interpretations influence their participation in the sensemaking, and why they interpret it in the ways that they do. Within this, Dr. Berland has begun exploring the intersection between engagement in sensemaking, power dynamics, and relationships within the community. Through this most recent work, Dr. Berland is interested in how participants in a professional learning community—including researchers and k-12 educators—navigate their different positions, identities, and ideologies in order to build a shared (or not) goal, as they move towards developing a more antiracist school community.

Each of her research foci is designed to better understand the dynamics of how and why learners are able (or unable) to productively engage in sensemaking and have implications for the design of learning environments and classroom communities.