This strand of research examines how students' learning ecologies play an active role in their learning, with a focus on mathematics education. For example, we are currently studying teaching and teacher adaptations to the realities of teaching displaced students as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas war (see the recent seminar talk in Hebrew or Gilead et al., 2024; Marco et al., under review). This research project is titled "Navigating Displacement: Challenges and Adaptation Strategies of Teachers in Schools for Internally Displaced Youth", and it is supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) at the Weizmann Institute of Science at a level of 34,000 USD. Previously, we examined how ultra-Orthodox students' previous Talmud learning experiences in the Yeshiva, shaped their learning in the mathematics classroom. We used methods of classroom discourse analysis to understand the role of students' identities in the construction of a new mathematical-Talmudic hybrid discourse, and its influence on students' learning (Ehrenfeld & Heyd-Metzuyanim, 2019). Other examples of investigating the cultural and political contexts of math learning, are a study where we explored different framings of "mathematics" within socio-ecological perspectives (Chen & Ehrenfeld, 2023), and a paper by Rubel & Ehrenfeld (2020), where we explored the intersectional experiences of Palestinian/Arab Israeli women in Israel within the context of mathematics education.
An illustrative publication:
Marco, N., Gilead, T., Ehrenfeld, N., & Nurik, Y. (under review). Teachers in provisional schools for displaced students: Navigating challenges, autonomy, and responses.