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). 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.
Examples of publications:
Chen, G. A., & Ehrenfeld, N. (2023). Where (or who) is the mathematics in socio-ecological mathematics education research? Proceedings of the ICMI Symposium on Mathematics Education and the Socio-Ecological (pp. 119-121). International Commission on Mathematics Instruction (ICMI).
Rubel, L., & Ehrenfeld, N. (2020) Palestinian/Arab Israeli women’s experiences in mathematics education: an intersectional analysis. International Journal of Educational Research. 102, 101616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101616.
Ehrenfeld, N. & Heyd-Metzuyanim, E. (2019). Intellective identities and the construction of a hybrid discourse: the case of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish mathematics classroom. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education. 17, 739–757. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-018-9885-z.