INDIGO ESMONDE, PhD
2009 KSTF Research Fellow
Assistant Professor,
Mathematics Education
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto

Dr. Indigo Esmonde's research and university-level teaching focus on helping educators develop more equitable and culturally responsive ways to teach mathematics.It is a topic she has been exploring for years:  Indigo’s award-winning PhD thesis at the University of California, Berkeley explored equity inmathematics cooperative learning structures and was entitled“How are we supposed to, like, learn it, if none of us know?”

Indigo earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Queen’s University in 1997. She received her master’s in mathematics from McGill University in 1999 and an MA. in cognition and development from the University of Berkeley in 2001, the same year she designed curriculum for the Distributed Learning Workshop. From 2002-2006, Indigo was a research associate for Diversity in Mathematics Education (DiME) at the University of California, Berkeley and served on the planning team for a 2004 conference on Justice and Access through Math and Science.  

Indigo earned her PhD from Berkeley in cognition and development in 2006 and was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s School of Education before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2007. She is currently developing a project for excellence in environmental education under a Letter of Intent grant from the government of Canada. “We plan to partner with several school boards in Ontario and Manitoba and conduct action research with teachers to develop effective ways of teaching about environmental sustainability in schools.” 

Project Summary

Indigo’s project on learning to teach mathematics for social justice will create a community of inquiry for secondary teachers to explore these questions in the course of their professional development. Her research draws on socio-cultural theories of learning and development to consider issues of equity in mathematics education. “An understanding of equity must take into account how the details of classroom interaction provide or deny students access to ideas about mathematics, and access to positive mathematical and cultural identities.”

Awards and Recognitions

Government of Canada (2009); Connaught Start-up Award for Longitudinal Study of Collaboration in Mathematics (2007-2008); Outstanding Dissertation Award, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley (2007)

Publications

• Esmonde, I. (2009). Explanations in mathematics classrooms: A discourse analysis. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education. 9(2), 86-99.
• Esmonde, I. (2009). Ideas and identities: Supporting equity in cooperative mathematics learning. Review of Educational Research. 79(2), 1008-1043.
• Esmonde, I. (2009). Mathematics learning in groups: Analyzing equity in two cooperative activity structures. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 18(2), 247-284.
• Enyedy, N., Rubel, L., Castellón, V., Mukhopadhyay, S., Esmonde, I., & Secada, W. (2008). Revoicing in a multilingual classroom. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 10(1), 1-29.
• Saxe, G. B., & Esmonde, I. (2005). Studying cognition in flux: A historical treatment of Fu in the shifting structure of Oksapmin mathematics. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 12(3&4), 171-225.
• Saxe, G. B., & Esmonde, I. (2005). Genetic method and empirical techniques: Reply to Hatano and Sfard’s commentaries on Cognition in flux. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 12(3&4), 251-257.