Ilana Seidel Horn
Biographic Data
| ID | 167908 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ilana Seidel Horn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ilana Seidel |
| FAMILY NAME | Horn |
| SIGNATURE | HORN I S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0214-9063 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 152 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Mathematics Education at the End of the World
In democratic societies, education is said to operate as a meritocratic equalizer, granting upward social mobility to those willing to work hard and develop their talents. In the 21st century, however, such mobility has decreased across the globe, particularly in countries with greater economic inequality. As a result, education’s promise to enable a better life has become ever more tenuous.
Articulating Human Engagement
The influx of AI tools presents researchers with potential aids toward new frontiers of discovery. At the same time, given the increased pressure on productivity goals, they also present serious temptations to shortcut the careful thinking needed for rigorous and trustworthy scientific work and pose threats to scientific integrity.
“It felt like I became a part of her”
Teachers’ emotional struggles in the workplace have received increasing attention due to their impact on teacher well-being and student development. Existing literature adopted a deficit-based approach, emphasizing individual emotion regulation skills while overlooking the social and interpersonal dynamics that shape their emotional struggles. Grounded in embodied theories and narrative inquiry theory, this study designed and implemented an Embod…
Teachers as agentic synthesizers
Background Teacher learning from professional development (PD) remains undertheorized. Most PD studies focus on its content or structure to gauge learning, leaving substantive gaps in our understanding of teacher learning processes and the role of contexts. Therefore, we investigate teachers’ learning as they take practices from PD and adapt them to their own settings.Methods Using ethnographic methods and taking a situative perspective, we offer…
Teachers’ subjectivities in responsive instruction
In the pursuit of inclusive classrooms, educators have identified the importance of teachers’ responsiveness to the particular students they teach. To date, research on responsive teaching has emphasized students’ subjectivities. In this study, we use a situative perspective on teacher learning to examine teachers’ subjectivities as they learn and sustain responsive instructional practice. Using fieldnotes, video, and interviews from two critical…
Situating Teacher Movement, Space, and Relationships to Pedagogy
In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.” Our analysis proposes an integrative framework to study classroom interactions and teacher movement over space and time comprised of four salient characteristics within lessons…
Teachers coping in the classroom
Just like their students, teachers face mental health struggles in their classrooms. Many of them must learn to cope with teacher-facing trauma while balancing students’ needs and commitment to teaching, which is emotionally exhausting. Authors Christine E. Hood, Ilana Horn, Katherine Schneeberger McGugan, Karen Underwood, Jessica Smith, and Brette Garner write about a case of a teacher whose well-being was negatively affected by trauma as well a…
A Call for Critical Bifocality
Education researchers have long wrestled with the interplay of oppressive structures and individual agency in reproducing, sustaining, and contesting marginalization. In this article, we suggest that Weis and Fine’s construct of critical bifocality may assist researchers in understanding and addressing marginalization in mathematics education. We conduct a conceptual review of existing mathematics education literature that accounts for both struc…
Even when it was hard, you pushed us to improve”
You Need to Be More Responsible”
How do teachers account for homework-related inequalities? Our longitudinal ethnographic study reveals that, despite awareness of structural inequalities in their students’ lives, elementary- and middle-school teachers’ practices centered the myth of meritocracy. They treat struggles with math homework as products of students’ and (particularly in elementary grades) parents’ insufficient responsibility, effort, and motivation. These interpretatio…
"Making Justice Peripheral by Constructing Practice as "Core
Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we…
Accountability as a Design for Teacher Learning
Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCLB. Using discourse analysis, I identify instances of torque in their conversations: when educators’ …
A Taxonomy of Instructional Learning Opportunities in Teachers' Workgroup Conversations
Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers' collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than 100 mathematics teacher workgroup meetings in 16 different middle schools, selected as "best cases" of …
Teaching as a Profession
Opportunities for Professional Learning in Mathematics Teacher Workgroup Conversations
Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this article compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of 3 mathematics teacher workgroups. We examined the differences in OTLs in 17 hr of videotaped meetings from 3 gro…
Making Sense of Student Performance Data
In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teac…
Talk and Conceptual Change at Work
In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed when workgroups in clinical health sciences and secondary mathematics teaching seek to improve their wo…
Teaching Replays, Teaching Rehearsals, and Re-Visions of Practice
Background/Context Research shows that teachers’ understandings of students, subject, and teaching influence their classroom practice. Additionally, teachers’ colleagues have a role in shaping individuals’ approaches to teaching and their responses to reform. Focus of Study To understand how interactions with colleagues support teachers’ informal learning, I examined teachers’ collegial conversations in a highly collaborative teacher community. S…
Attending to Problems of Practice
The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high sch…
Lessons Learned From Detracked Mathematics Departments
Students' mastery of and achievement in high school mathematics is considered pivotal to their opportunities for and within postsecondary education. For this reason, many educators have attempted to implement equity-geared reforms, including detracking, that affect the organization and instruction of high school mathematics. This article describes how schools with successful detracked mathematics programs share 4 characteristics: (a) a view of su…
Learning on the Job
To investigate teachers' everyday on-the-job learning, I used a comparative case study design and examined the work of mathematics teachers in 2 high schools. Analysis of interviews, classroom observations, and teachers' conversations highlighted 3 key resources for learning: (a) reform artifacts oriented the teachers' attention to key concepts of a reform, whereas the interactions surrounding them established local meanings; (b) conversation-bas…
Attending to Problems of Practice
The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high sch…
"Making Justice Peripheral by Constructing Practice as "Core
Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we…
A Taxonomy of Instructional Learning Opportunities in Teachers' Workgroup Conversations
Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers' collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than 100 mathematics teacher workgroup meetings in 16 different middle schools, selected as "best cases" of …
Making Sense of Student Performance Data
In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teac…
Accountability as a Design for Teacher Learning
Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCLB. Using discourse analysis, I identify instances of torque in their conversations: when educators’ …
You Need to Be More Responsible”
How do teachers account for homework-related inequalities? Our longitudinal ethnographic study reveals that, despite awareness of structural inequalities in their students’ lives, elementary- and middle-school teachers’ practices centered the myth of meritocracy. They treat struggles with math homework as products of students’ and (particularly in elementary grades) parents’ insufficient responsibility, effort, and motivation. These interpretatio…
Even when it was hard, you pushed us to improve”
Lessons Learned From Detracked Mathematics Departments
Students' mastery of and achievement in high school mathematics is considered pivotal to their opportunities for and within postsecondary education. For this reason, many educators have attempted to implement equity-geared reforms, including detracking, that affect the organization and instruction of high school mathematics. This article describes how schools with successful detracked mathematics programs share 4 characteristics: (a) a view of su…
Teachers’ subjectivities in responsive instruction
In the pursuit of inclusive classrooms, educators have identified the importance of teachers’ responsiveness to the particular students they teach. To date, research on responsive teaching has emphasized students’ subjectivities. In this study, we use a situative perspective on teacher learning to examine teachers’ subjectivities as they learn and sustain responsive instructional practice. Using fieldnotes, video, and interviews from two critical…
Situating Teacher Movement, Space, and Relationships to Pedagogy
In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.” Our analysis proposes an integrative framework to study classroom interactions and teacher movement over space and time comprised of four salient characteristics within lessons…
Learning on the Job
To investigate teachers' everyday on-the-job learning, I used a comparative case study design and examined the work of mathematics teachers in 2 high schools. Analysis of interviews, classroom observations, and teachers' conversations highlighted 3 key resources for learning: (a) reform artifacts oriented the teachers' attention to key concepts of a reform, whereas the interactions surrounding them established local meanings; (b) conversation-bas…
Lessons Learned From Detracked Mathematics Departments
Students' mastery of and achievement in high school mathematics is considered pivotal to their opportunities for and within postsecondary education. For this reason, many educators have attempted to implement equity-geared reforms, including detracking, that affect the organization and instruction of high school mathematics. This article describes how schools with successful detracked mathematics programs share 4 characteristics: (a) a view of su…
Teaching Replays, Teaching Rehearsals, and Re-Visions of Practice
Background/Context Research shows that teachers’ understandings of students, subject, and teaching influence their classroom practice. Additionally, teachers’ colleagues have a role in shaping individuals’ approaches to teaching and their responses to reform. Focus of Study To understand how interactions with colleagues support teachers’ informal learning, I examined teachers’ collegial conversations in a highly collaborative teacher community. S…
Attending to Problems of Practice
The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high sch…
Talk and Conceptual Change at Work
In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed when workgroups in clinical health sciences and secondary mathematics teaching seek to improve their wo…
Teaching as a Profession
Opportunities for Professional Learning in Mathematics Teacher Workgroup Conversations
Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this article compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of 3 mathematics teacher workgroups. We examined the differences in OTLs in 17 hr of videotaped meetings from 3 gro…
Making Sense of Student Performance Data
In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teac…
A Taxonomy of Instructional Learning Opportunities in Teachers' Workgroup Conversations
Many school-improvement efforts include time for teacher collaboration, with the assumption that teachers' collective work supports instructional improvement. However, not all collaboration equally supports learning that would support improvement. As a part of a 5-year study in two urban school districts, we collected video records of more than 100 mathematics teacher workgroup meetings in 16 different middle schools, selected as "best cases" of …
Accountability as a Design for Teacher Learning
Using a learning design perspective on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I examine how accountability policy shaped urban educators’ instructional sensemaking. Focusing on the role of policy-rooted classifications, I examine conversations from a middle school mathematics teacher team as a “best case” because they worked diligently to comply with the NCLB. Using discourse analysis, I identify instances of torque in their conversations: when educators’ …
"Making Justice Peripheral by Constructing Practice as "Core
Reformers are increasingly calling for and adopting practice-based approaches to teacher preparation, with particular emphasis on identifying and centering core practices. In this article, we argue that organizing teacher education around core practices brings its own risks, including the risk of peripheralizing equity and justice. Situating our argument within the broad economic trends affecting labor and higher education in the 21st century, we…
A Call for Critical Bifocality
Education researchers have long wrestled with the interplay of oppressive structures and individual agency in reproducing, sustaining, and contesting marginalization. In this article, we suggest that Weis and Fine’s construct of critical bifocality may assist researchers in understanding and addressing marginalization in mathematics education. We conduct a conceptual review of existing mathematics education literature that accounts for both struc…
Even when it was hard, you pushed us to improve”
You Need to Be More Responsible”
How do teachers account for homework-related inequalities? Our longitudinal ethnographic study reveals that, despite awareness of structural inequalities in their students’ lives, elementary- and middle-school teachers’ practices centered the myth of meritocracy. They treat struggles with math homework as products of students’ and (particularly in elementary grades) parents’ insufficient responsibility, effort, and motivation. These interpretatio…
Teachers coping in the classroom
Just like their students, teachers face mental health struggles in their classrooms. Many of them must learn to cope with teacher-facing trauma while balancing students’ needs and commitment to teaching, which is emotionally exhausting. Authors Christine E. Hood, Ilana Horn, Katherine Schneeberger McGugan, Karen Underwood, Jessica Smith, and Brette Garner write about a case of a teacher whose well-being was negatively affected by trauma as well a…
Situating Teacher Movement, Space, and Relationships to Pedagogy
In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.” Our analysis proposes an integrative framework to study classroom interactions and teacher movement over space and time comprised of four salient characteristics within lessons…
Teachers as agentic synthesizers
Background Teacher learning from professional development (PD) remains undertheorized. Most PD studies focus on its content or structure to gauge learning, leaving substantive gaps in our understanding of teacher learning processes and the role of contexts. Therefore, we investigate teachers’ learning as they take practices from PD and adapt them to their own settings.Methods Using ethnographic methods and taking a situative perspective, we offer…
Teachers’ subjectivities in responsive instruction
In the pursuit of inclusive classrooms, educators have identified the importance of teachers’ responsiveness to the particular students they teach. To date, research on responsive teaching has emphasized students’ subjectivities. In this study, we use a situative perspective on teacher learning to examine teachers’ subjectivities as they learn and sustain responsive instructional practice. Using fieldnotes, video, and interviews from two critical…
Mathematics Education at the End of the World
In democratic societies, education is said to operate as a meritocratic equalizer, granting upward social mobility to those willing to work hard and develop their talents. In the 21st century, however, such mobility has decreased across the globe, particularly in countries with greater economic inequality. As a result, education’s promise to enable a better life has become ever more tenuous.
Articulating Human Engagement
The influx of AI tools presents researchers with potential aids toward new frontiers of discovery. At the same time, given the increased pressure on productivity goals, they also present serious temptations to shortcut the careful thinking needed for rigorous and trustworthy scientific work and pose threats to scientific integrity.
“It felt like I became a part of her”
Teachers’ emotional struggles in the workplace have received increasing attention due to their impact on teacher well-being and student development. Existing literature adopted a deficit-based approach, emphasizing individual emotion regulation skills while overlooking the social and interpersonal dynamics that shape their emotional struggles. Grounded in embodied theories and narrative inquiry theory, this study designed and implemented an Embod…
Pedagogy (17 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (15 works) · Mathematics education (14 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Teaching method (5 works) · Education and Technology Integration (4 works) · Innovative Teaching and Learning Methods (4 works)