Catherine Dornfeld Tissenbaum

Catherine Dornfeld Tissenbaum serves as an Assistant Professor in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Education. Her research focuses on collaborative learning with technology, distributed scaffolding, and the influence of social/cultural factors on education. She works at the intersection of formal and informal learning environments, particularly with marginalized communities.

• Current appointment: Assistant Professor, Curriculum & Instruction
• Institutional affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Research areas: Participatory design methodologies, epistemic justice in educational spaces, translanguaging practices, and youth agency in museum-based learning

Her recent publications demonstrate a commitment to:

• Centering Latina/x youth voices through Participatory Design Research (PDR) and Design-Based Research (DBR) frameworks
• Challenging epistemic injustice in curated learning environments
• Developing bilingual and multilingual educational interventions
• Creating community-engaged museum exhibitions
• Implementing culturally sustaining pedagogies
• Analyzing the emotional labor in participant-centered research

Methodologically, she employs mixed-methods approaches, qualitative narrative inquiry, and social network analysis to understand learning processes across physical and virtual spaces. Her work particularly examines how afterschool programs can serve as third spaces for marginalized youth to process school experiences, build confianza, and assert their identities through creative expression.

Key publications highlight:

• Redesigning educational interventions based on participant feedback
• Translanguaging as epistemic validation
• Using chisme (gossip) as cultural practice for trust-building
• Facilitating self-representation through multimodal art exhibits
• Developing epistemic tools for marginalized communities
• Comparative analysis of physical vs. virtual lab environments