Melissa Gresalfi
Biography
Melissa Gresalfi is an assistant professor in the learning sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research considers the ways that elements of learning environments afford opportunities for students to learn, and specifically unpacks the interaction between opportunities to learn and individual students’ ability or willingness to take up those opportunities. By investigating different instructional designs, her research addresses the ways that particular kinds of classroom and curricular participation structures afford opportunities for all students to engage with mathematics. Looking across these different environments, Gresalfi’s research attends to the affordances for participation for diverse communities of students, and the kinds of dispositions towards learning that students have opportunities to develop. In so doing, Gresalfi’s research unpacks how participation and learning can be seen as a result of social structuring, rather than individual potential.