April Luehmann

Biography

April Luehmann joined the Warner School community in 2002 as a science educator, teaching in the science teacher preparation and doctoral programs. She previously taught mathematics and science to secondary school students in Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. Luehmann is a principal investigator on a current Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that studies how practicing teachers are using a brief culture-setting unit to establish classroom norms and commitments for justice-centered ambitious science teaching throughout the school year. In addition, she leads the project team in considering ways networked professional learning communities of teachers understand and enact justice-centering practice.

Luehmann is also the lead designer and researcher for the Warner School innovative teacher education program that merges learning to teach in out-of-school settings as a complement to and scaffold for learning to teach in in-school (high-stakes) settings. Each year of the program, the science education master’s students join peers from other disciplines to engage in a longstanding community-based partnership. Together, they run a transdisciplinary environmental climate action camp for local rural teens. In this context, she studies questions such as: How do professional identities shift when engaging in place-based, culturally sustaining pedagogy? And how can youth construction of multimedia scientific representations nurture positive and transformative disciplinary identities? A third focus of research for Luehmann centers on the design and implementation of emergent technologies to support learning and teaching. For example, Luehmann has done research on the value of social and tactile augmented reality for including all students in collaborative learning, especially those who may struggle to keep up.

Luehmann’s scholarly work and teaching have received recognition. In 2011, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Full-Scale Development Grant, titled Science STARS - Nurturing urban girls’ identities through inquiry-based science ($1.25 million; August 2011-July 2015).  In 2008, she was presented with the University of Rochester’s G. Graydon ‘58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Nontenured Member of the Faculty.