Affiliates: Cohort 1

Krakowski, Moshe Moshe Krakowski has a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and is currently in his third year as PhD candidate in the department of Learning Sciences. He has a strong interest in ultra-Orthodox Jewish education and is in the process of developing a research program that investigates the nature of elementary schooling in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. He is examining how secular knowledge is presented in a curriculum that devotes the overwhelming majority of the day to religious knowledge. He is also looking at how successful schools are at teaching secular knowledge in such an environment. He hopes that this course of research will be more generally interesting in the way that it sheds light on how subcultures that have radically different epistemologies than the dominant culture interact with that dominant culture. Moshe's other graduate work involves Bruce Sherin’s conceptual dynamics project. This work is an effort to understand what it is that kids learn when they are engaged in science classes. In particular, it is looking at the ways in which the learning is different in traditional and project-based science curricula. Unsworth, Sara Sara Unsworth is very interested in the extent to which cultural processes affect cognition, as well as the role of congruence in cognitive frameworks in classroom achievement. As research investigating the relationship between culture and cognition continues to grow, it is becoming evident that different cultural experiences can result in differences in how information is organized and represented. These differences might lead to a lack of congruence between the way in which information is presented and organized in a cultural community and the way in which information is presented and organized in the classroom. To examine this issue more closely, she conducts ethnography and experimental research with Menominee Native Americans and European Americans who live in rural Wisconsin, as well as with urban Native Americans living in Chicago. She would like to help to bring awareness about the extent to which different cultural "ways of knowing" within the United States match "ways of knowing" in the classroom, as well as the extent to which the degree of match affects successful learning.