About

Emma Gargroetzi is an assistant professor of STEM education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersection of identity, power, and educational justice in the mathematical lives of children and youth, drawing inspiration from her 15 years of experience working with young people in New York City, Latin America, and California's Bay Area. Her work examines the use of quantitative reasoning in youth, civic composing, and the possibilities for educational dignity within mathematics learning environments. Emma predominantly employs ethnographic methods and video-based social interaction analysis in her research. As a 2022 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, Emma is working on the Transdisciplinary Civic Learning Collaborative, which aims to combine literary and quantitative practices for civic learning and social problem-solving. Her project explores how transdisciplinary collaboration between Humanities and STEM educators can foster youth identities and engagement in literacy, mathematics, and civic life, with a focus on building an anti-oppressive and inclusive democracy. Emma holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University with a dual focus on race, inequality, and language in education and mathematics education, along with master's degrees from Columbia University Teachers College and Brooklyn College, and a bachelor's degree from Vassar College.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Pedagogy
• Psychology
• Mathematics education
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Law
• Public relations
• Developmental psychology
• Geography
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Science Practices for College, Career, and Civic Readiness

  2026-04-16

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Quantitative civic literacies: “Let’s talk about election 2020” and youth use of numbers in digital civic media

  The Journal of Mathematical Behavior · 2025-04-21 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Uncovering Emotion in Youth Digital Civic Participation Around Climate Change: Entanglements of Fear, Despair, and Anger in Civic Practice

  Science Education · 2025-04-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Attention to emotion could offer insight into supporting the science‐informed civic participation of young people. We drew on sociocultural views of emotion, civic participation, and science literacies to examine digital civic media about climate change produced by youth during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, investigating intersections of emotional, civic, and scientific practices of making meaning. Using mixed‐methods, we analyzed 82 media pieces created by youth across the US. With an analytic framework informed by prior research and adapted to meet our data, we found two common patterns that emerged in over half of the data set: (1) fear and/or despair around the impacts of climate change and (2) anger over inaction around mitigating climate change. Additionally, we found that the fear/despair pattern was associated with youth engagement in civic empathy and the anger pattern was associated with youth practices of critique. We also identified less common and less distinct patterns, including positive emotion around actions, guilt around causes, and generalized worry across youth civic authors. We use these findings to suggest that emotion is entangled in youth civic participation around climate change, and that such participation can be afforded and constrained by emotion. We offer implications for teaching and use our findings to call attention to the need for science education that attends to the emotional nature of youth social practices within and beyond science‐related civic issues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Supporting Civic Learning in the Mathematics Classroom: Examples and Reflections from Teacher Inquiry

  The New Educator · 2025-02-10 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Identity, Power, and Dignity: A Positional Analysis of Gisela in Her High School Mathematics Classroom

  Journal for Research in Mathematics Education · 2024-05-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Multiply minoritized learners face racialized, gendered, and ableist hierarchies of mathematical ability that shape the organization of schools and classrooms and can significantly challenge access to identities as mathematical learners and practitioners as well as to fundamental human dignity. Classrooms and everyday interactions can perpetuate or interrupt these conditions. Contributing to questions about the relationships among identity, power, and dignity in mathematics learning, this article presents a positional interaction analysis of Gisela, a Disabled 10th-grade Latina student, as she took up, challenged, and renegotiated identities of mathematical thinker, learner, and community member over the course of one school year.

  PublisherDOI

• Mathematics Identity Rainbows

  Mathematics Teacher Learning and Teaching PK-12 · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This activity engages students with the concept of mathematics identity to expand conceptions of what mathematics is and therefore what doing mathematics and being mathematical can mean.

  PublisherDOI

• The Mathematics of Parental Organizing Against Impending School Closures (Poster 12)

  2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Schooling is and What it Could Be: Exploring How We Learn the Discourses and Technologies of Public Education in School-Adjacent Spaces

  Proceedings. · 2023-10-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the US in recent years, public engagement in public schools has become highly politicized, reflecting the polarized discourses circulating in media and inflamed by national figures. “Official” spaces for public input exist alongside multiple less officially policy-relevant spaces where youth and adults learn and negotiate the function/ing of public education. This symposium examines how diverse school-adjacent spheres of public life function as pedagogical spaces - spaces where the discourses and technologies of schooling are learned through the cognizant and non-cognizant design and organization of discourse and activity. The cases considered span from youth-centered spaces such as the school bus and a middle school debate team to a case examining the intersection of how news and social media is negotiated at a public committee meeting and closing with two contrasting examples of school district-sponsored public forums addressing issues such as overcrowding and budget.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Teacher Political Learning as Emergent Practice

  2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Learning as Emergent Practice in the Transdisciplinary Civic Learning Collaborative

  Proceedings. · 2023-10-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Conceptualizing learning as emergent practice, we explore the political learning of teachers in a teacher learning community.Drawing on data from two years of monthly virtual meetings, we identify four emergent practices that have come to cohere in the group: multivocality, interrogating boundaries, identity inquiry, and affective attunement.After a brief summary of these practices, we trace their negotiation in one interactional episode.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lynne Zummo

  Natural History Museum of Utah

  6 shared

• Antero Garcia

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Rosa Chavez

  5 shared

• Jennifer M. Langer-Osuna

  Stanford University

  5 shared

• Jen Munson

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Hakeoung Hannah Lee

  3 shared

• Kimiko E. Lange

  2 shared

• Alexandra Aguilar

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Curriculum and Teacher Education

  Stanford University

• Master of Science, Teaching Students with Disabilities

  Brooklyn College

  2011

• Master of Arts, International and Transcultural Studies

  Teachers College of Columbia University

  2008

• Bachelor of Arts, Political Science

  Vassar College

  2005

Awards & honors

• NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022 - 2024)
• Spencer Small Grant (2021 - 2022)
• Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship, Stanford University (2019 -…
• Dean's Collaborative Learning Fund, Stanford Graduate School…
• Haas Graduate Public Service Fellow, Stanford University Haa…