2024 Susan Gay Travel Scholarship Recipient
Kelly Womack Adams
Biography
Kelly Womack-Adams is a fifth-year doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University studying Teacher Education and Learning Science with a concentration in Elementary Education Mathematics. She also holds a BS and an MEd in Elementary Education and a BS in Mathematics from North Carolina State University. Prior to her PhD program, she taught high school mathematics and 4th grade in public schools in her area. Her research focuses on dialect and language in the early elementary mathematics classroom. The driving questions in her work are: How are students using their native dialects and language variations to express mathematical thinking and learn mathematical concepts? and How are teachers responding to the use of dialects and language variations in the early elementary mathematics classroom? Her goal is to help teachers to be able to listen for the mathematical validity in the many ways students express their understanding verbally, opening the space for more dialects to be accepted as mathematically valid.