Dr. Barron is a developmental psychologist who studies processes of collaborative learning in and out of school. She studies how individuals work together to create joint products and how what is learned and created is related to the quality of their interactions. In a five year NSF supported CAREER award she documented adolescents’ learning ecologies (e.g. learning opportunities across home, school, libraries, virtual communities, clubs, camps) for technological fluency development across diverse communities in the Silicon Valley region with the goal of understanding how to design more equitable opportunities for learning. She co-leads the LIFE center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), funded by the National Science Foundation in 2005. Barron is PI for a grant funded by the MacArthur Foundation that will follow students longitudinally as they participate in programs designed to develop their technological fluency through activities such as game design, robotics, and digital movie making. The theoretical goal of this work is to articulate conditions that lead to the diversification of a child’s learning ecology through increasing activity in learning activities across settings.

Brigid Barron, Stanford Graduate School of Education | Email: barronbj@stanford.edu