Patricia Buenrostro
Areas of Study
Secondary and mathematics education
Patty Buenrostro is an assistant professor of Secondary Education at °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï in Lake Forest, IL. Prior to joining the faculty at LFC, she completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with Project SIGMa (Supporting Instructional Growth in Mathematics), a teacher coaching project with mid-career, urban, secondary math teachers. She is a member of the Sustainable Community Schools Task Force, a joint endeavor between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teacher's Union. In her role as a task force member, she collaborates to support and oversee school development of culturally-relevant pedagogy and restorative justice practices. Patty earned her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 in Curriculum Studies. In her dissertation, Humanizing Mathematics: Students’ Perspectives on Learning Math for Social Justice, she reported on students’ retrospective meanings in using mathematics as a disciplinary lens to unpack socio-political issues impacting their communities. Prior to earning her doctorate, she was a high school mathematics teacher and coach in Chicago for 15 years in working-class, Latinx and African-American communities. Across schools, she collaborated with faculty to create counter-cultural spaces that support students’ positive academic, cultural and social identities shaping her research interests: student-teacher relationality, teachers’ orientations towards developing student in(ter)dependence, and justice-oriented curriculum design.