Kelly Billings

Kelly is a sixth year doctoral candidate at the Berkeley School of Education in the Learning Sciences and Human Development cluster. Kelly’s work is deeply informed by her teaching experience in Oakland, California and former students. In pursuing a graduate degree, Kelly hopes to highlight the amazing work Oakland students and STEM teachers are doing to integrate local justice issues into classroom projects and conversations.

Kelly's current research focuses on collaborating with Bay Area teachers to design learning environments that support students in using data science to investigate socio-scientific issues in their communities, including issues of public health, environmental justice, and data privacy. Her work also seeks to understand how structures within teacher-researcher partnerships can increase teacher agency and leadership. She currently works as a graduate student researcher (GSR) on two projects in the TELS group. The first, called ARISES, focuses on designing anti-racist science curricula. The second, NLP-TIPS, focuses on utilizing natural-language processing to identify student ideas in written science explanations.

Kelly also works as a graduate student instructor, university supervisor, and graduate student researcher (GSR) in the CalTeach program at Berkeley. Kelly uses her previous experience as a science department lead and mentor teacher to support undergraduate students in her courses to develop their teaching practice and prepare for classroom teaching positions. As a GSR she has worked on a project focused on supporting teacher candidates to develop STEM data literacy teaching practices and has led alumni, cooperating teacher, and administrator interviews in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of the CalTeach program.