Vishesh Kumar
Collaboration, Learning, Making, Games
Curriculum Vitae (last updated November, 2023)
Current: I’m an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education while being a core/board faculty member at the Learning Innovation Incubator (LIVE) Initiative.
Background: I grew up in New Delhi (1994-2000 & 2004-2011) and Vishakhapatnam (2000-04). Received a Bachelor’s of Design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (2011-2015). Then got a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (in the Design, Informal, and Creative Education program), advised by Matthew Berland.
Most recently, I worked with Marcelo Worsley, primarily on the SportSense project leading the tech development of numerous tools and activities for sports spaces, implementation of different curricula using these tools, and research around these implementations.In my current position, I aim to initiate and extend projects that center a sense of collective and interdependent understanding of, and belonging in the world. I design and study tools and activities aimed at enriching learning through and across diverse social configurations (e.g. competitive vs. collaborative and fluid ensemble vs. turn-taking). Enabling these different kinds of social learning opportunities has the potential to unsettle dominant disciplinary boundaries and practices, as well as persistent teacher-student, adult-child, expert-novice binaries – critical for enabling richer connections to people’s whole lives and across time, community, and space. I also aim to prioritize supporting minoritized learners – across lenses of gender, race, and dis/ability among others – in seeing themselves as capable participants with a sense of rightful belonging, funds of knowledge, and values that are relevant and valuable for their communities’ and personal growth. He has engaged in this inquiry through enabling constructionist creative experiences, often through play, while reconceptualizing and “measuring” learning through a variety of qualitative as well as analytic methods. This work has taken the shape of designing to foster more peer-to-peer collaboration opportunities in making environments , socially complex games for enacting and thinking about sustainability and development , and enabling young athletes to see how they can be competent and critical users and creators of technology in their personal ambitions .
selected publications
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ISLSInvited symposium—Regional and socio-epistemic heterogeneity in the learning sciences: Supporting transnational dialogues on equity and justice2022
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Comm. StudiesProcedural Collaboration in Educational Games: Supporting Complex System Understandings in Immersive Whole Class SimulationsCommunication Studies, 2021