Starting in December 2024, we are organizing the December Lectures, an online lecture series on DBR, in collaboration with EDeR. The first lecture will take place on December 5, 2024, 17:00-18:00 (CET). Heather Lynn Johnson, a mathematics education researcher from the University of Colorado Denver, will share insights from her inspiring DBR studies under the title “How Graphs Work: A Design-Based Approach to Cultivate Community Among Introductory Undergraduate Mathematics Instructors”.

Abstract
In U.S. postsecondary education, there is a need to transform instruction in introductory mathematics courses (i.e., courses serving as prerequisites for Calculus and/or degree requirements for broad range of majors). An intractable problem has been an underemphasis on reasoning and exploration and an overemphasis on answer finding and procedural skills. Through a a U.S. National Science Foundation funded intervention, I have led a response to this problem: Leverage freely available digital resources, “techtivities,” focused on the cross-cutting topics of functions and graphs, to promote students’ reasoning and to disrupt “business as usual” practices. Introductory mathematics instructors across three postsecondary institutions have created community around the techtivities. At each institution, instructional leaders were key to sustaining the community, because those leaders were positioned as local experts in their own cultures and contexts. The next step is to scale up across more institutions, to broaden the community. I describe design and progress to date, then share an instructional leader model, developed to cultivate community within and across institutions. The theory of change underlying the model networks community of practice and organizational theory. I conclude with implications for turning to design to scale up promising interventions.

Please register by December 3 via dbr.hul@uni-hamburg.de to receive the participation link.

If you are interested in offering a lecture yourself in the future, please contact the EDeR editorial office (tobias.jenert@upb.de).