Cathery Yeh

Ph.D. in Education, 2016
School of Education

October 1, 2011

“In ten years of teaching I have visited over 300 homes.”

Cathery Yeh is a student in the Department of Education with a specialization in Learning, Cognition, and Development. Cathery received her B.A. in Psychology and her M.A. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests focus on the preparation and professional development of mathematics teachers. Cathery is particularly interested in investigating ways in which teacher learning experiences can effectively prepare teachers to “center” the mathematics teaching around their students. She believes equitable mathematics teaching requires the inclusion of students’ mathematical thinking and their cultural and community experiences as contexts for classroom mathematization.

Prior to entering the doctoral program at UCI, Cathery was an elementary school teacher in the urban areas of Los Angeles and Orange County. Cathery believes children’s thinking, particularly in the area of mathematics, develops in the multiple context of their lived experiences. Therefore, she saw it as a necessity to learn about her students, their families, and their community. In her ten years of teaching, Cathery has visited over three hundred student homes. This allowed her to better understand her students’ out-of-school experiences and to use these experiences as a springboard to create curricula that enabled her students to explore connections between themselves, their culture and history, and math.

Outside of her role as a classroom teacher, Cathery has served as a model teacher for Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), as a presenter and organizer of local and regional mathematics conferences, and as an author and editor for the Problem Solvers section of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTMTeaching Children’s Mathematics. Cathery has also taught English as a second language and worked with impoverished youths in Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, and China.

During her first year at UC Irvine, Cathery had the opportunity to work closely with Dr. Rossella Santagata on the Learning to Learn from Mathematics Teaching (LLMT) Project. This project investigates the use of video technology as a tool to develop pre-service teachers’ knowledge and skills for learning from analysis and reflection of teaching. Recently, Cathery was awarded the Susan Gay Conference Scholarship from the American Mathematics Teacher’s Association (AMTE) to attend the 2012 AMTE Annual Meeting where she and Dr. Santagata will be presenting findings from this research.

In her free time, Cathery enjoys seeing the world again through “new” eyes from the perspectives of her two precocious daughters, Emy and Eliannah.

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