Steven Zuiker

Steve Zuiker is an associate professor of the learning sciences in the division of educational innovation and leadership. His research is broadly based on the notion that ideas are only as important as what we can do with them. Learning environments, like school gardens and video games, as well as research findings, like scholarly journal articles, can each be both useful and used to create value in educational and local communities. Dr. Zuiker's research agenda explores how to design activities, resources, and projects that interconnect classrooms and schoolyards, digital video games and real-world activities, and ultimately, educational research and educational practice.

His scholarship and publications advance two goals related to what we can all do with ideas. First, through design-based research, he develops and improves learning and teaching systems in K-12 science education, often utilizing digital technologies. For example, environmental sensor networks in gardens and virtual environmental scenarios in video games can be tools to support students' meaningful engagement with science in a classroom, on campus, and with the local community. Second, he investigates how educational research itself is a system of learning and teaching in which research reports remain one among many means of sharing ideas and doing things with them. In this way, Dr. Zuiker considers how educational practitioners and researchers organize these systems of learning and teaching and how digital technologies can enhance the social relationships through which education stakeholders inspire and enable insight and mutual understanding.

Education

• Ph.D. Learning Sciences, Indiana University-Bloomington
• M.A. Educational Psychology, University of Georgia
• B.A. Psychology, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Expertise

• learning
• design
• culture