April Luehmann
Associate Professor of Teaching & Curriculum University of Rochester
Areas of Expertise
Social
Biography
Luehmann is 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 work with University faculty to run an environmental action camp and a science inquiry club for local urban teens, both of which serve as foci for her research. An additional focus for Luehmann centers on the design and implementation of social and tactile augmented reality to support learning in formal (undergraduate STEM courses) and informal (museum and afterschool) contexts. Luehmann has also done research on the use of new media literacies, such as blogging to support learning. The book that she and Warner School Dean Raffaella Borasi edited in 2012 compiles a series of studies, conducted by Luehmann, that looked at how teachers blog for their own professional identity development and how classrooms blog to transform norms of participation.
Education
University of Michigan
MS
Science Education; Industrial and Operations Engineering
University of Michigan
PhD
Science Education; Industrial and Operations Engineering
2001
Selected Media Appearances
Local middle schoolers present public forum on Rochester’s need for trees
WHEC-TV tv
2022-10-29
April Luehmann talks about effort by local middle school students to address inequality in the urban forest.
Science teachers tackle COVID through social justice lens
Democrat & Chronicle print
2021-07-19
The goal was to make the science classroom "a place for understanding the phenomenon that's right outside our doors," said April Luehmann, director of Warner's science education program.
A little science on their summer vacacation
Finger Lakes Times online
2019-07-26
The camp was led by graduate students from the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education training to become science teachers.
April Luehmann, associate professor at the Warner School, created the program more than a decade ago. She said this is the third year the camp has been held in Sodus, done in partnership with the school district.
Augmented Reality Table Aids Chemical Engineering Experiments
Photonics.com online
2018-06-01
In other words, they "started reasoning with their bodies," said April Luehmann, an associate professor and director of secondary science education at the Warner School of Education, who is collaborating on the project. "At some point, the need for dialogue and words was transcended. That's great because the table gave the students more resources to communicate, a richer set of literacies. If we're going to prepare chemical engineering students to be part of a knowledge society, they need to be able to negotiate complex, ill-structured tasks. And that's the kind of thing that happens at that table."
Selected Articles
Augmented Reality Improved Learning of Lower-level Students by Empowering their Participation in Collaborative Activities
International Society of the Learning SciencesApril Luehmann, Jingwan Tang, Yang Zhang, and Andrew White
2020-06-01
Many studies have shown that augmented reality (AR) can improve learning, but little is known about the mechanisms. To investigate this inquiry, we employed a mixed analysis method to approach the data coming from an experimental study. The quantitative findings showed that lower-level students performed better in the post-assessments for AR groups than for control groups. Qualitative analyses were conducted to explore how AR facilitated the lower-level students’ learning. The current findings suggested that: the AR’s feature of distributed labor, openness, real-time feedback, and operational symbolic items sustained the lower-level students to engage with higher-level students in problem-solving activity inclusively, jointly, and authentically.
Social and Tactile Mixed Reality Increases Student Engagement in Undergraduate Lab Activities
Journal of Chemical EducationApril Luehmann, Rainier Barrett, Heta Gandhi, Anusha Naganathan, Danielle Daniels, Yang Zhang, Chibueze Onwunaka, and Andrew White
2018-10-09
Undergraduate lab sessions play a crucial role in building and reinforcing conceptual understanding in STEM education. In third and fourth year higher education, lab sessions can be challenging to incorporate into the curriculum due to cost, safety, or difficulty in realizing abstract concepts. Mixed reality (MR) systems provide a novel solution due to their ability to nurture collaboration and tactile interaction. In this work, an MR system designed for use in chemical kinetics undergraduate curriculum is described.
Unpacking ‘signs of learning’ in complex social environments: Desettling neoliberal market-driven educational methodologies, epistemologies and recognitions of learning
International Society of the Learning SciencesApril Luehmann, Jennifer Adams, Sylvie Barma, Marie-Caroline Vincent, Samantha Voyer, Jrène Rahm, Ferdous Touioui, Pratim Sengupta, Marie-Claire Shanahan, Stephanie Hladik, Dylan Paré, and Rachel Chaffee
2018-06-23
This structured poster session examines the design and study of meaning making in and across multimodal contexts, exploring how recognition of new signs of learning, in new ways, might enter into the reconfiguration of educational practices and institutions. We expand on recent work in the learning sciences that challenges prevailing power structures and the ways that they are produced by existing ways of recognizing learning.
“Reflexivity Is Kicking Our Asses”: Tensions in Foregrounding Photographs in a Multimodal Ethnographic Analysis of Participation
Anthropology and Education QuarterlyApril Luehmann, Rachel Chaffee, and Joseph Henderson
2016-12-01
Bringing multimodal and ethnographic approaches together, this paper seeks to identify key considerations, limitations, and implications of using photographs as primary data. We offer a concrete example of an approach that capitalizes on a systematic look at how different modes work together to foreground unique aspects of participation, while intentionally and explicitly maintaining ethnographic sensitivities. Key contributions include what it means to “trust” photographs as data and use them for their strengths in evidence-careful ways.
