Christina Siry

Chris Siry holds a PhD in Urban Education, City University of New York, specializing in Science Education and joined the CODI-SCILE-A project in September 2009 (Prof. Dr. Charles Max).

Her research interests focus on pre-service and in-service preparation for the teaching of science. In particular, she is examining her own field-based methods courses in which new teachers learn to teach by coteaching in a second grade classroom. Using a foundation of socio-cultural theory, her ethnographic research focuses on the dialectic relationship of the individual and the collective. At the individual level, she examines identity development, and individual participation and learning in a field-based methods course. At the collective level, she considers the ways that teacher candidates form collective identities and group solidarity. Through this research, she is focusing on the emerging possibilities for identity transformation as teachers begin to enact new roles in the classroom. These shared classroom experiences provide for multiple perspectives and ground my work in an authentic setting.

A central focus of her research is exploring the role of collaboration through coteaching and cogenerative dialogue in teacher preparation. As an elementary teacher educator she was also interested in the construction of childhood, and in supporting teachers in working together with their elementary aged students. Therefore, she has also been collaborating with pre- and in-service teachers to utilize cogenerative dialogues at the elementary level with children. A foundation of her work is the importance of acknowledging the complexity and interconnectedness of situating research within her own courses and working towards incorporating multiple voices and perspectives in her teaching and in her research.