Education

Areas of Study

Secondary and mathematics education

Patty Buenrostro is an assistant professor of Secondary Education at Lake Forest College 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.