Professor Elise Lockwood of Oregon State University will visit Maynooth University from 21 August to 10 September 2025. This visit is funded by a Fulbright Specialist Award and by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
About Professor Lockwood:
Elise Lockwood is a Professor in the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University. She received her PhD in Mathematics Education from Portland State University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary research interests focus on undergraduate students’ reasoning about combinatorics and discrete mathematics, and she is passionate about improving the teaching and learning of mathematics. She has published over 45 refereed journal articles, and she has over 50 refereed conference papers. She has been a Principal or Co-Principal Investigator in multiple nationally funded projects; for example, in 2017 she was awarded an National Science Foundation Career Award, in which she investigated ways that computational activities can be leveraged to help students solve counting problems more successfully. She was a 2018 winner of the Mathematical Association of America’s Selden Prize, which awards promising early career researchers in undergraduate mathematics education, and she received Oregon State University’s university-side Promising Scholar award in 2019. From 2021-2024 she worked as a program officer in to the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation in the US. She is currently a Co-Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. In January 2025, President Biden presented her with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding early-career scientists and engineers.
Workshops:
During her visit to Maynooth, Professor Lockwood will design and deliver two research-based workshops for mathematicians, educators, curriculum developers, and mathematics education researchers. Underlying both of these workshops will be Professor Lockwood’s expertise in mathematics education research, and we envision the workshops as research-based sessions that seek to inform practice. In particular, Professor Lockwood will draw on her own experiences with conceptual analysis (Thompson, 2008), task-based clinical interviews (e.g., Hunting, 1997), and teaching and design experiments (e.g., Steffe & Thompson, 2000). In the workshops, Professor Lockwood will share her experiences with conceptual analysis informing task design, and she will present ideas on leveraging these constructs in qualitative mathematics education research and in classroom settings.
Workshop 1:Exploring Connections between School and University Mathematics in Ireland: Conversations about Facilitating and Assessing Problem Solving
Dates: 26 and 27 August
Location: MS2, Logic House, Maynooth University
Target audience: Mathematics Lecturers, Mathematics Education Lecturers, Curriculum Developers, Mathematics Education Researchers and anyone involved in the education of teachers.
Description: Given the focus on problem solving in the new Leaving Certificate curriculum, Professor Lockwood will lead discussions on relevant readings and perspectives related to fostering and assessing problem solving in teaching and learning mathematics. With these perspectives and literature in mind, workshop participants will design problem solving tasks to connect mathematics that pre-service teachers will teach with undergraduate-level mathematics that they themselves have recently learned. By the end of the workshops, participants will have selected a topic that connects secondary teaching with undergraduate mathematics, designed classroom task activities that elicit rich problem solving, and presented and discussed these tasks. The workshops should be valuable to curriculum developers, as well as those who conduct research in mathematics education or who teach classes to prospective mathematics teachers.
Registration: Workshop 1
Workshop 2: Task Design to foster rich student engagement in mathematics courses
Dates: 2 and 3 September
Location: MS2, Logic House, Maynooth University
Target audience: Mathematics Lecturers, Mathematics Education lecturers, Curriculum Developers, Mathematics Education Researchers.
Description: In this workshop, Professor Lockwood will lead participants to consider task design related to a particular mathematical topic they will teach in an upcoming course. In this process, participants will discuss relevant readings in mathematics education, and Professor Lockwood will draw on her work in combinatorics education to present data and tasks designed to elicit certain ways of thinking among undergraduates. By the end of the workshops, participants will have engaged in a conceptual analysis of a chosen topic, designed interview and/or classroom task activities, and discussed and critiqued their tasks and others’ tasks. Participant activities will include discussing relevant readings, jointly analyzing research data, engaging in conceptual analysis of chosen topics, designing tasks, and analyzing and discussing those tasks in small- and whole-group settings. The workshops should be valuable for those who conduct research in mathematics education or who teach mathematics classes.
Registration: Workshop 2
Informal Meetings: The workshops and seminars will offer some formal spaces in which Professor Lockwood can interact with members of the mathematics education community in and around Dublin (and Ireland in general). However, we envision rich opportunities for informal meetings with interested faculty and students throughout Professor Lockwood’s stay. Thus, throughout her entire visit, in addition to the seminars and the workshops, Professor Lockwood will set aside hours every day to meet with any interested faculty or students. In these meetings, we see the chance to start to build potential collaborations, to discuss specific research questions, and to talk about other aspects of mathematics education research. For example, Professor Lockwood could read a draft of a manuscript, could offer advice on publishing or grant writing, could discuss data episodes, or could give input on theoretical or methodological questions.
Please contact Professor Ann O'Shea with any queries.