Research
Four questions
This page is organised around questions rather than fields. The questions have travelled better than the disciplinary labels.
Learning design
What makes a problem worth giving to students?
Project-based learning depends less on the project format than on the quality of the problem underneath it, and on whether the teaching team has been supported through a way of working that is new to them. Recent work covers problem posing in mathematics teaching, cases of teaching as material for reflection, formative assessment with digital portfolios, and collaborative learning with artificial intelligence in interdisciplinary settings.
At IT:U this is daily practice: courses in AI literacy, project-based learning, maker labs, and accessibility; PBL teaching for master's and doctoral students; and learning pathways for European higher education through the UNINOVIS Alliance.
Interdisciplinary innovation
What has to change for disciplines to actually work together?
Interdisciplinarity is easy to declare and hard to run. It asks people to give up the assessment habits, vocabulary, and pace of their own field, and it usually fails at that level rather than at the level of ideas. This strand looks at what makes collaboration across fields hold together once the enthusiasm wears off.
Three threads run through it. Sustainable futures, as a shared problem that no single discipline can answer, and the organising principle behind the ICME-16 topic group and the STEAM Kitchen work on sustainability. AI and large language models, both as collaborators in project-based settings and as objects of scrutiny, since what a model assumes about gender and social difference becomes part of what it teaches. Self-regulated learning, studied through formative assessment and digital portfolios, because interdisciplinary work asks students to direct themselves in ways a single-subject course never does.
Policy
What does a system assume before it decides?
Policy analysis can be descriptive, reconstructing what a policy does, or prescriptive, arguing for what it should do. The distinction sounds academic until you notice that many disagreements about education reform are really disagreements about which of the two is being attempted.
Empirically, the master's research analysed fifteen years of Brazilian federal education data (FUNDEB, FNDE, and IDEB, 2005 to 2019) using geospatial and regression analysis, examining how funding levels relate to student performance and what follows for municipal authorities.
Equity in STEM
Who is a STEM classroom built for?
Gender, sexuality, and rural or marginalised communities are often treated as additions to STEM education. Here they are questions internal to it: what a pedagogical practice assumes about its students shapes what that practice can teach.
Current and recent work includes an intersectional analysis of ethnomathematics and gender in a rural family house, a STEAM framework for queer and LGBT+ empowerment presented at ECER, and earlier work on homotransphobia in Brazilian schools.
Projects and service
European projects
Core team member on TransEET, STEAM Kitchen, STEPAM, STEAMCraft, and STEM+. Proposal development for Erasmus+, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and Horizon Europe.
Conference organisation
Conference Co-Chair and Principal Organiser, M-CTRAS 2025 at JKU Linz. Topic Group Organiser for ICME-16 Prague 2028 on Sustainability and Mathematics Education.
Working across contexts
Most of this empirical work compares settings rather than describing one, across Brazil, Austria, Montenegro, and the Nordic countries. Partly biography, partly method: comparison is what makes visible the assumptions a single system treats as natural.
Enquiries are welcome, particularly on interdisciplinary programme design, AI in learning, sustainability, or equity in STEM education. Contact details are here.