Kathryn Kirchgasler

Assistant Professor

katie.kirchgasler@wisc.edu


226-E Teacher Education Building

225 N Mills Street

Madison, WI 53706

Kirchgasler, Kathryn

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Kathryn L. Kirchgasler is Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Department 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.

Katie’s 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. Drawing on historicizing and ethnographic approaches, she explores how current efforts to include all students rely on inherited practices that create new forms of exclusion and demands for assimilation.

Her scholarship, recognized by a National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024), appears in the Teachers College Record, Science Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Curriculum Inquiry, and Paedagogica Historica. She received her doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2018) and gave an invited keynote for the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (2018).

Katie teaches graduate and undergraduate seminars that explore post/de/anticolonial studies, raciolinguistic perspectives, and Science & Technology Studies. She previously taught science at an East Boston middle school and as a Fulbright teaching assistant at a bilingual primary school in Spain. As a teacher educator, Katie aims to support pre-service teachers in questioning standardized norms, dismantling raciolinguistic hierarchies, and interweaving principles of culturally relevant, linguistically sustaining, and justice-centered pedagogies. She serves on the Leadership Council of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS).

Katie enjoys working with interdisciplinary graduate students interested in questions of power, racialization, and coloniality across science education, mathematics education, and STEM higher education, as well as environmental, health, bilingual, multicultural, and teacher education.

Education

  • PhD Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018
  • BA Psychology, Williams College, 2006

Select Publications

  • Ziols, R., & Kirchgasler, K. L. (2024). Slow emergencies of racism in mathematics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 116, 371-389.
  • Yolcu, A., & Kirchgasler, K. L. (2024). Social (justice) mathematics: Racializing effects of ordering pedagogies and their inherited regimes of truth. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 116, 351-370.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L., & Kuhlmann, N. (2023). Historicising inclusion: how science curricular differentiation produced populations of concern in the United States and West Germany (1960s–1980s). Paedagogica Historica, 59(1), 124-144. Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2023). Science class as clinic: Why histories of segregated instruction matter for health equity reforms today. Science Education, 107(1), 42-70. Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L., & Yolcu, A. (2022). “Real-Life Needs”: How Humanitarian Techniques Produce Hierarchies of Science and Mathematics Education. Teachers College Record, 124(11), 30-57. Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Ziols, R., & Kirchgasler, K. L. (2021). Health and pathology: A brief history of the biopolitics of US mathematics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 108, 123-142. Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2020). Dangers of “making diversity visible”: Historicizing metrics of science achievement in U.S. educational policy. G. Fan & T. Popkewitz (Eds.), The International Handbook of Education Policy Studies: Volume II New York: Springer Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2019). Strange precipitate: How interest in science produces different kinds of students.. W. Letts & S. Fifield (Eds.), STEM of Desire: Queer Theories and Science Education, 191-209. Leiden: Brill Online Publication/Abstract.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2018). Moving the lab into the field: The making of pathologized (non)citizens in U.S. science education. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(1), 115–137. Online Publication/Abstract.

Select Presentations

  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2023). The manufacture of hierarchies in STEM higher education: Why our fields’ forgotten histories matter today. Invited lecture presented at the UW System Chemistry Faculties Meeting, Madison, WI. Link
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2022). Raciolinguistic foundations of U.S. science education: From segregated schooling to equity reforms. Invited lecture, Talking Race in the Borderlands Speaker Series, San Diego State University, Virtual. Link
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2021). Raciolinguistic and historicizing perspectives. Invited seminar (co-presenter: Diego Román), Sandra K, Abell Institute for Doctoral Students, National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Virtual. Link
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2018). A “win-win strategy” and its colonial history: Making healthier citizens in science class. Invited Lecture at TERC, Cambridge, MA.
  • Kirchgasler, K. L. (2018). A paradox of diversity and inclusion: Making the future citizen in science education. Keynote for the XVIII Symposium of the International Organization for Science and Technology Education, Malmö, Sweden. Link

Select Awards and Honors

  • Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, National Academy of Education, 2024