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
• Engineering
• Law
• Gender studies
• Engineering ethics
• Multimedia
• Environmental ethics
• Knowledge management
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Indigenous Science Education and STEM-related Education

  2025-01-07

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Education broadly conceived includes the when, where, why, and how of teaching, learning, and maturation. From this perspective education takes shape and evolves across many contexts, including familial and kin relations; informal settings such as community-based organizations, museums, and libraries; and school settings from early childhood to post-secondary. Science, like education, is concerned with the how and why of things. Indigenous science education is grounded in the philosophical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual traditions and practices of Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). IKS is holistic, relational, and informed by experience in and with the natural world. Although IKS are tribally specific, there are commonalities and shared practices across communities. Indigenous knowledge systems ground much of Indigenous science education. While some principles of IKS and Indigenous science education that we discuss will apply to Indigenous peoples globally, there are also important differences to hold across geopolitical contexts. Rather than collapsing the vast heterogeneity of global indigeneity into a single category, we found it important to limit our scope. Furthermore, it may be inappropriate for the authors—Indigenous people from nations who largely reside within the borders of what is currently considered the United States and Canada—to reach beyond this scope. At the same time, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that there is important research within the field of comparative Indigenous education that speaks to connections between the local and the global. In addition, Indigenous peoples globally have traded, collaborated, and exchanged knowledge since time immemorial, and they continue to do so. IKS has taught us, the authors, to view reading and writing as activities that carry with them responsibilities for being in a relation with knowledge. Thus, this article is structured to provide relevant studies, reports, and resources on Indigenous science education and STEM-related education contextualized within what is currently known as the United States and Canada. And in this context, the authors use both Native and Indigenous interchangeably throughout this bibliography. The article is organized around four main sections: (1) Paradigms for Indigenous Science Education, (2) Indigenous Science Education across the Life-Span, (3) Curriculum and Assessments within Indigenous Science Education, and (4) Professional Organizations, Key Reports, and Books.

  PublisherDOI

• From the Light of Rainbows: Growing the Spiralic Garden of Community-Based Inquiry and Co-Learning

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal · 2024-05-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper considers my relationship as a co-learner (i.e., evaluator) with the Indigenous Early Learning Collaborative (IELC). I draw on my history of relations and conversations with IELC partners and explore what it means to be a co-learner along a number of dimensions (e.g., roles, responsibilities, reciprocity). Throughout the paper, I discuss the use of metaphor and story as forms of knowing that can support co-learning and Community-Based Inquiry in consequential ways. I conclude by reflecting on what it means to listen for and hear goodness as a co-learner.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Co-Research in Video Analysis: Shifts Towards Ethical Validity

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Qualitative research historically involved "member checking" to establish ecological validity.Video-based researchers have also begun to consider ethical validity in engaging participants in additional research processes to distribute research resources more equitably.Our teams include co-researchers who are traditionally positioned as participants or subjects.We introduce these teams and then engage in breakouts with youth and families, professional dancers and musicians, and teachers who have engaged in various stages of video-based research.We will then come together to discuss experience.We hope to foreground conversation at the intersection of ethical validity, ecological validity, and sensemaking dignity. Session overviewQualitative researchers have long involved participants in diverse ways to support participatory (Buckley & Waring, 2013;Charmaz, 2006;Mannay, 2015;Strauss & Corbin, 1990).Yet, in Learning Scineces (LS) videobased research traditions participants have often been left out of analysis (DeLiema et al., 2023).We focus on how involving participants in research processes contributes to ecological and ethical validity.We use ecological validity to refer to trustworthiness and generalizability.We use ethical validity to describe equitable distribution

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Learning for Every Body: Intersectional Dimensions of Embodied Learning

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Caring Relations Across Interaction Analysis Labs

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This symposium brings together a multi-generational group of scholars who are participants, designers, and leaders of Interaction Analysis (IA) labs across multiple universities.Having experience with and taking inspiration from the methodological work of Candy and Chuck Goodwin and Rogers Hall, we will discuss the ways in which our IA labs are striving to push the method forward through norms and practices developed over time.In this session, we will discuss the development of caring relations across our various contexts.Though care is expansively conceived (care between researchers, between researchers and participants, for collective video viewing), our participation in IA labs will organize our work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reimagining Learning Research in “canada” as “road Making”: Opportunities to Move Toward Equity Through Walking Methodologies

  Proceedings. · 2023-10-03 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  This symposium advances walking methodologies, and the kinds of learning and research relations that emerge through walking, as a significant process for "road making" toward more equitable futures in the Learning Sciences.The papers gathered here highlight diverse forms of walking together: from cultural anthropological research (Lee & Ingold, 2006) to walking with and alongside community activists (Curnow, Davis, & Asher, 2018; Takeuchi & Aquino Ishihara, 2021), to walking as learning and coming to know with and from the land (Marin & Bang, 2018), to reimagining place from transnational perspectives (Adams, 2013), and wayfaring as figuring both science and identities (Rahm, Gonsalves, & Lachaîne, 2022).Through dialogue within and across papers, we emphasize the ways in which walking methodologies make visible materiality and relations with the more-than-human world (Marin, 2020), as well as effects and experiences of inequity, with attention to co-constructing caring and equitable relations through shared walking.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perspective Taking and Psychological Distance in Children’s Picture Books: Differences Between Native and Non-Native Authored Books

  Sociocultural explorations of science education · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  book-chapter
  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, and place; (b) affect, awe, and emotion; (c) pedagogical interactions, supports, and participation; and (d) reimagining learning and the disciplines. We argue that attending to relationality in ways that include between-persons + place + more-than-human relations helps conceptualize learning as deeply tied to the ongoing forms of adaptation, ethical relations, and worldmaking required for socio-ecological well-being.

  PublisherDOI

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

  Curriculum Inquiry · 2022 · 32 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  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 American descent) is an Assistant Professor of Social Research Methodology in UCLA’s Department of Education and faculty in American Indian Studies. Her research explores questions about the cultural nature of teaching, learning, and development. This interview with two Indigenous scholars provides educators with a chance to explore the possibilities of Indigenous worldviews on their climate change praxis. The scholars ask educators to consider how white and human supremacy are perpetuated in current educational paradigms. They discuss the necessity of transformations between relationships between humans and the natural world in fighting climate change. Bang and Marin underline the importance of education that immerses children in learning with places, paying attention to embodied, relational, axiological, and world-building dimensions of storying with lands.

  PublisherDOI

• “Globalization,” Coloniality, and Decolonial Love in STEM Education

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education · 2022-01-27 · 22 citations

  reference-entryOpen accessSenior author

  From the era of European empire to the global trades escalated after the World Wars, technological advancement, one of the key underlying conditions of globalization, has been closely linked with the production and reproduction of the colonizer/colonized. The rhetoric of modernity characterized by “salvation,” “rationality,” “development,” and nature-society or nature-culture divides underlies dominant perspectives on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education that have historically positioned economic development and national security as its core values. Such rhetoric inevitably and implicitly generates the logic of oppression and exploitation. Against the backdrop of nationalist and militaristic discourse representing modernity or coloniality, counter-voices have also arisen to envision a future of STEM education that is more humane and socioecologically just. Such bodies of critiques have interrogated interlocking colonial domains that shape the realm of STEM education: (a) settler colonialism, (b) paternalism, genderism, and coloniality, and (c) militarism and aggression and violence against the geopolitical Other. Our ways of knowing and being with STEM disciplines have been inexorably changed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which powerfully showed us how we live in the global chain of contagion. What kinds of portrayal can we depict if we dismantle colonial imaginaries of STEM education and instead center decolonial love—love that resists the nature-culture or nature-society divide, love to know our responsibilities and enact them in ways that give back, love that does not neglect historical oppression and violence yet carries us through? STEM education that posits decolonial love at its core will be inevitably and critically <italic>transdisciplinary</italic>, expanding the epistemological and ontological boundaries to embrace those who had been colonized and disciplined through racialized, gendered, and classist disciplinary practices of STEM.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

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