Ananda Marin

About

Ananda Marin is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She is a learning scientist who received her doctoral degree from Northwestern University. Her research explores the socio-cultural dimensions of learning and development in everyday and intergenerational contexts. She examines the practices that children and families use to reason and build knowledge about the natural world, with particular interest in how families coordinate attention and observation during science activities, how mobility and place structure activity, and cultural variability in sensemaking practices such as question-asking and explaining. Additionally, she investigates Native American participation in STEM and cultural models of self related to senses of capability and competence. Her scholarship employs a participatory approach and utilizes various research methods including community-based design research, cognitive tasks, studies of everyday practices, content analysis, discourse analysis, interaction analysis, and video-ethnography. Through her work, she aims to answer fundamental questions about development, innovate research methods, and design teaching and learning tools that support the goals and well-being of Indigenous and non-dominant communities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics education
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Ecology
• Medical education

Selected publications

• “Look It, This is how You Know:” Family Forest Walks as a Context for Knowledge-Building About the Natural World

  Cognition and Instruction · 2018-04-03 · 156 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This case study focuses on a Native American family's experience on a walk in an urban forest preserve. Drawing on interaction analysis traditions, we analyze video data and transcript data to characterize how learning unfolds in place, in this case an urban forest. We build on this analysis, as well as the work of Indigenous scholars, to theoretically develop walking, reading, and storying land as a methodology for making sense of physical and biological worlds.

  PublisherDOI

• Ambulatory Sequences: Ecologies of Learning by Attending and Observing on the Move

  Cognition and Instruction · 2020 · 67 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  There is a growing corpus of research in the educational sciences that explores the multiple ways in which mobility, or people’s movement from place to place and through places, both constitutes and influences learning. Ambulatory methods and walking interviews are increasingly being used by social scientists and performance researchers to understand human knowledge building from place-based perspectives. In this paper, I consider how educational researchers can create accounts of learning that…

  PublisherDOI

• Why Learning on the Move: Intersecting Research Pathways for Mobility, Learning and Teaching

  Cognition and Instruction · 2020 · 41 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Mobility provides the fabric of everyday life but is rarely considered part of learning and is almost never used as relevant, experiential content in teaching. This special issue integrates ideas and efforts across different fields into a more unified framework to study and design for what we call Learning on the Move. Approaches used in these studies reflect various ontological and epistemological standpoints, especially with regard to the role of moving bodies, place, and lands/waters in learn…

  PublisherDOI

• Undoing human supremacy and white supremacy to transform relationships: An interview with Megan Bang and Ananda Marin

  Curriculum Inquiry · 2022 · 32 citations

  Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang’s research focuses on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. Ananda Marin (African American, Choctaw [non-enrolled], European…

  PublisherDOI

• Toward Just and Sustainable Futures: Human Learning and Relationality Within Socio-Ecological Systems

  Review of Research in Education · 2023-03-01 · 27 citations

  article

  This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learning and development, we provide a conceptual model that examines four interrelated dimensions of relationality: (a) embodiment, mobilities, attention, a…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sophia Marlow

  University of Manitoba

  49 shared

• Sarah El Halwany

  University of Calgary

  49 shared

• Anita Chowdhury

  University of Calgary

  49 shared

• Miwa Aoki Takeuchi

  49 shared

• Mahati Kopparla

  University of Pittsburgh

  49 shared

• Nadia Qureshi

  Institute for Christian Studies

  49 shared

• Jennifer D. Adams

  49 shared

• Kristen Schaffer

  University of California, San Diego

  49 shared

Labs

• American Indian StudiesPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Northwestern University

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Teresa McCartyh-37
• Shannon Speedh-20
• Jessica Cattelinoh-14