SCD Spotlight: Affiliate Gloriana González

Curriculum & Instruction professor and Siebel Center for Design Affiliate  Dr. Gloriana González, is bringing Human-Centered Design (HCD) into geometry classrooms and building a community of teachers to carry it forward.

Before moving into higher education, González taught middle and high school math, where she was always drawn to ambitious, interdisciplinary projects. HCD gave that instinct a home, offering an umbrella where art, engineering, and geometry could come together. “[HCD] can include all these aspects and still they have a unifying theme,” González explained.

In 2023, González and Saad Shehab, SCD’s Senior Associate Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives, were awarded a $1,375,742 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Discovery Research PreK-12 program for the project Engaging Teachers in Integrating Human-Centered Design for Geometry Problem-Based Instruction. 

The team behind this project calls itself the FRACTAL Research Group. “We realized that we’re implementing HCD at all these levels,” González explained. Not unlike a Sierpinski triangle, or a head of broccoli where a small piece looks just like the whole, the group practices HCD on the researcher, teacher, and student levels, so the name serves as a direct metaphor for the work being done.

Alongside González and Shehab, the group includes:

• Graduate Research Assistants, Jane Pak and Sourabh Garg
• Undergraduate Research Assistant, Annya Kong
• Research Assistants, Mayahuel Gutiérrez Malik and Ted Powers

According to González, partnering with SCD helped her give this work a shared language. The HCD taxonomy offered a name and framework for what the group was doing, and Shehab regularly challenges the team to think beyond geometry toward STEM more broadly.

Just as valuable, González said, is the center’s spirit of experimentation.

 “You can try things and it’s okay if things are not perfect because it’s a prototype and then the next time maybe it gets better and you learn,” she said.

In year one, the team developed design-based geometry lessons. In years two and three, teams of middle and high school teachers took part in lesson study cycles. Each team chose a lesson, adapted it for one teacher’s classroom, and taught it while being video recorded. They then watched the footage together to see how students engaged in mathematical modeling and design thinking.

The result is nine refined lessons spanning textile, fashion, lighting, and engineering design, with upwards of 400 students participating.

Each time the FRACTAL Research Group leads a lesson, they arrive with a box of materials students can pull from to engage in mathematical modeling. In all lessons, students get the same erasable pens used on Project Runway, which gets them excited to engage and think about geometry through the lens of a designer. In the textile design lesson, students study geometric patterns in textiles they love and paint their own fabric designs on a large grid. For one of these classes, members of FRACTAL then surprised the students by creating a laser-cut version of the final textile design in SCD’s Shop.

Across every lesson, students have the opportunity to be creative while also learning something about themselves and the people around them. “That element of being creative or talking to other people or thinking about ways in which you can meet the needs of the user has been central to the project,” González explained. “[The] HCD approach has helped us to make this a reality.”

For teachers, the project offers something rare: dedicated time to collaborate. González reminds the teachers that they already are designers, a reframe that invites them to share what they know with peers and envision new lessons for their own classrooms.

Now in its fourth and final year, the team has turned its focus to sharing what they’ve learned. The group has given about two dozen presentations, including four at the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference and talks in California and Sweden. A paper on the textile lesson is headed to Korea next month, and the team will also present in Baltimore in February. Five papers are currently under review, with more in progress. The team is also preparing a website featuring all nine lessons and their curriculum materials, along with a podcast series sharing stories from the classroom.

What started with five teachers has grown into a community of more than 60, and the team’s goal now is to keep growing long after the grant ends, so that more students get to build lanterns, walk runways, and discover that math is something they can design with.

 

Highlighted FRACTAL Research Group Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings:

González, G., Garg, S., & Shehab, S. (2025). Geometry teachers’ reflections-in-action for noticing students’ design thinking during lesson study. In R. M. Zbiek, X. Yao, A. McCloskey, & F. Arbaugh (Eds.), Proceedings of the forty-seventh annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 356-360). Pennsylvania State University. https://www.pmena.org/pmenaproceedings/PMENA%2047%202025%20Proceedings.pdf 

Shehab, S., Pak, J., Attarian, R., & Heredia, M. (2025). Designing Scaffolding Cards for Design Challenges in K-12 Settings, in Clemente, V., Gomes, G., Reis, M., Félix, S., Ala, S., & Jones, D. (Eds.), Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.150 

González, G., Shehab, S., & Powers, E. (2024). Teaching geometry to advance design justice. In T. Lowrie, A. Gutiérrez, & F. Emprin (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) Study, Advances in Geometry Education (pp. 451-458) Reims, France. https://icmistudy26.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/26th_ICMI_Study_Proceedings_2.pdf