About

Samantha Marshall is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University. She is a first-generation college graduate who earned her B.S.E. in mathematics from Oklahoma Christian University, her M.A. from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching & Diversity from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on exploring how STEM learning environments can better serve all students and investigating STEM teachers’ learning. Her work aims to design, investigate, and refine supports for teachers’ learning, with particular attention to professional development, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and translanguaging pedagogies. Dr. Marshall’s research spans questions of teachers’ learning through professional development, how teachers’ learning is shaped by enactment in context, and how STEM teachers learn to implement ambitious, asset-based, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. She adopts a situative and sociopolitical perspective to understand learning in context and employs qualitative methods from design-based research, case studies, discourse, and interaction analysis. Her current NSF-funded projects include examining math teachers' learning to support multilingual learners through teacher coaching and supporting teachers in leveraging students’ languages in mathematics. She has contributed to the fields of STEM education, teacher education, and learning sciences through her publications and research projects, emphasizing equitable and responsive pedagogies for linguistically marginalized students.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Mathematics education
• Psychology
• Pedagogy
• Political Science
• Psychotherapist
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Using concept constellations to illuminate collective teacher learning

  Learning in Context · 2026-04-02

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: the role of affect in STEM teacher learning

  Instructional Science · 2026-02-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How does it feel to hear colleagues doubt mathematics students' ability to learn?What might move otherwise asset-oriented teachers to express such sentiments?What simmers beneath their responses, and how might professional development facilitators support their affective learning?Several recent reviews have identified a marked increase in the amount of research on teachers' affect and/or emotions over the past few decades.In response to longstanding and widespread agreement that emotions are integral to teachers' lived experiences and that teaching is an emotional practice (e.g., Hargreaves, 1998), teacher education scholars are increasingly examining the nature of teachers' emotions, their antecedents, and their consequences (e.g., J. Chen & Cheng, 2021); the unwritten rules that regulate emotional displays in schools (e.g., Stark & Bettini, 2021); and how emotions interact with specific types of teaching, such as teaching for social justice (Reagan & Hambacher, 2021).However, even as these scholars call for further attention to teacher emotion, the role of affect in STEM teacher learning remains seriously underexplored.Perhaps this is because STEM disciplines are still widely viewed as objective and neutral, and as privileging rationality over other ways of knowing or modes of expression.Plenty of research from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions, however, illustrates that emotions are integral to human experience and consequently, to learning.In fact, because "affect infuses disciplinary practices" (Jaber & Hammer, 2016, p. 192), ignoring emotions means ignoring important aspects of how people do and learn STEM, and relatedly, how they learn to teach STEM.By contrast, acknowledging emotions and treating them as powerful pedagogical resources has the potential to be rehumanizing and even subversive (Boler, 1999;Gutirrez, 2022).To this end, researchers are increasingly examining G. A. Chen et al.articles in this issue, use affect and emotion interchangeably to describe the non-cognitive, often embodied, feelings that STEM teachers experience in their work.We imagine, however, that careful conceptualizations of affect and emotion beyond the individual and sociocultural, drawing on affect theories from other disciplines, could spark significant advances in future research.The papers in this special issue illuminate the character and role of emotions in teacher resistance, learning, and agency, naming not only that STEM teachers experience emotions as they learn but what happens as a result.They highlight the importance of accounting for affect and emotion in theories of teacher learning, and, by implication, in the design of teacher education, offering a foundation for future empirical research and theory development.Though they begin to fill in the blanks about the role of affect in STEM teacher learning, we know there are many more fascinating questions out there, and that many scholars are already considering some of them.We hope that this special issue whets your curiosity and invite you to join us.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deficit narratives as teacher foils: how vulnerability and emotional regimes shape teacher discourse

  Instructional Science · 2025-08-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Teachers’ collegial conversations can be important sites for teachers’ learning, but sometimes result in deficit narratives about students and families. Research seldom “gets inside” teachers’ collegial conversations to shed light on when and why deficit narratives arise. In this study, we investigate how deficit narratives are co-constructed, and what function they serve in teachers’ discourse. Specifically, we look at the relationship between teachers’ assignation of responsibility in relation to teacher vulnerability. Critical discourse analysis makes visible how teacher vulnerability and emotions precipitated deficit narratives. Across cases, we found that teachers offered deficit narratives in response to teacher vulnerability under emotional regimes that disallowed strong negative emotions. These deficit narratives served to shift the threat and return teachers’ emotions to acceptable levels under these emotional regimes. These findings have implications for design of teachers’ learning environments; in addition to addressing deficit ideas themselves, findings suggest the importance of attending to how emotional regimes structure teachers’ responses to vulnerability in teachers’ collegial talk.

  PublisherDOI

• Teachers as agentic synthesizers:Recontextualizing personally meaningful practices from professional development

  Journal of the Learning Sciences · 2025-03-17 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “I Think Those Are Mathematical”

  2025-08-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Calls for teaching that is culturally sustaining ring strong and clear from researchers and practitioners, but there remains a sizable theory-practice gap in mathematics. This chapter reports on findings from a four-year study on secondary mathematics and computer science teachers' learning of culturally sustaining pedagogies. Drawing on ethnographic data and using thematic analysis, analysis illuminates practical and content-specific ways these teachers thought about implementing these pedagogies in their classrooms. Although teachers offered many concrete ideas for culturally sustaining pedagogies in math, they also tended to focus on students' general assets, with less attention to cultural and community-based assets. This chapter provides vital examples of culturally sustaining pedagogies in mathematics, as well as the dilemmas and challenges that teachers face in learning them.

  PublisherDOI

• “So I don’t have to switch up who I am”: Experiences and perspectives of Black Language-speaking mathematics teachers on teaching that supports Black linguistic justice

  Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education · 2024-11-08 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• But What Does it Look Like in Maths?

  International Journal of Multicultural Education · 2023-04-28 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In response to urgent calls for teaching that is culturally affirming, scholars have developed a myriad of images of culturally sustaining (and related) pedagogies (CSPs). However, for maths teachers, CSPs remain elusive, in part because these images are typically content-neutral and their applicability to practice opaque. In this paper, I synthesize research to help conceptualize and clarify what CSPs may look like specifically in mathematics classrooms. I offer a framework for CSPs in mathematics comprised of four dimensions: (1) anti-assimilationism, (2) strengths-based teaching, (3) power and justice, and (4) affirming identities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reframing translanguaging practices to shift mathematics teachers’ language ideologies

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2023-02-17 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  AbstractWhile dominant narratives about multilingual students position them as deficient, translanguaging theory has played a critical role in making space for the languaging practices of multilingual students in education. However, we know little about how to best support mathematics teachers' learning about translanguaging. Working with a group of accomplished mathematics teachers taking part in professional development on culturally sustaining pedagogies, in this paper we use frame analysis to examine the ways language ideologies shape teacher sensemaking about translanguaging. We then investigate affordances of classroom video for reframing teachers' conceptualizations of language. We find that although teachers initially framed students' language as a barrier to their success, with the introduction of video clips from mathematics classrooms, teachers began to frame students' language as a tool for productive disciplinary engagement. These findings suggest that video may serve as a valuable resource for reframing teachers' conceptualizations of students' languaging practices in mathematics classrooms.Keywords: Translanguagingmathematics educationprofessional developmentmultilingual educationculturally sustaining pedagogies AcknowledgementThis research was conducted in affiliation with Vanderbilt University.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DRL-1620920 and DGE-1445197. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.Notes on contributorsSamantha A. MarshallSamantha A. Marshall is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Her research explores the design and affordances of STEM teacher learning environments, with an emphasis on justice-oriented pedagogies.Janna Brown McClainJanna Brown McClain is an assistant professor in the Department of Elementary and Special Education at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. Her research explores educator language ideologies and their connections with instructional decision making.Alexis McBrideAlexis McBride is an assistant professor of literacy in the Department of Child Study at St. Joseph's University in Patchogue, NY, where she is director of the TESOL M.A. program. Her research explores equitable pedagogies involving bi/multilingual literacies.

  PublisherDOI

• Teachers as Transformative Actors to Create Meaningful Learning: Agency in Practice

  Proceedings. · 2023-10-03

  articleOpen access

  This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments.The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various waysas individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborationsto construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society.Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other. Symposium summaryCurrently, students' lives are touched by economic inequality, racism, environmental crisis, and the ongoing global pandemic.Thoughtful teachers seek ways to reshape their practice in ways that respond to these realities.To support teachers' meaningful learning, professional education needs to account for teachers' agency, particularly as they confront the heightened ambiguity of the present moment.Instead of the commonplace approach of "delivering" professional learning for teachers to apply in their classrooms (Zeichner, 2010), recent scholarship recognizes teachers as sensemakers who are active agents in interpreting what they learn and in shaping learning environments considering their students' needs and public good.Nonetheless, the nature of

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• More than Multilingual: Investigating Teachers’ Learning to Support Multilingual Students through an Intersectional Lens

  The Educational Forum · 2023-03-07 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking both the complexity of identity and the contexts in which this work occurs. In this paper, we describe our intersectional approach to research, highlighting its affordances for research on teachers’ learning to support multilingual students. This intersectional lens opens urgent new research questions, invites different types of data, and offers informative analytic approaches to improve both research and practice.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brette Garner

  5 shared

• Ilana Seidel Horn

  Vanderbilt University

  4 shared

• Patricia Buenrostro

  Lake Forest College

  4 shared

• Katherine Schneeberger McGugan

  Vanderbilt University

  3 shared

• Amelia Q. Rivera

  2 shared

• Jesslyn Valerie

  University of Minnesota

  2 shared

• Nadav Ehrenfeld

  Weizmann Institute of Science

  2 shared

• Lauren Vogelstein

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development…
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Pro…
• Goodnight Early Career Innovator