Vossoughi Named ISLS Fellow
Northwestern University's Shirin Vossoughi, associate professor of learning sciences at the School of Education and Social Policy, has been elected a fellow of the International Society of Learning Sciences for her work studying how and why people learn.
A researcher who focuses on human learning and social change, Vossoughi is especially interested in how educators learn to teach in ways that are guided by justice, dignity, and well-being, and how students grow within settings that embrace their full personhoods. She uses observation and interaction to understand the conditions that give rise to deep learning and educational possibility.
Vossoughi has worked as a teacher, designer, and researcher across many different settings and age groups. Currently the co-editor of the journal Cognition & Instruction, Vossoughi understands learning as a fundamentally cultural, relational, and political process. Good research is a collaboration, she says, and teachers, families, and students are key partners in the work.
In 2024, Vossoughi was one of four School of Education and Social Policy learning scientists who co-authored a National Academies report on equity in K-12 science education.
Several current Northwestern programs and partnerships are based on her research findings, including the SESP Leadership Institute, a rigorous academic program and supportive community for incoming first-generation and low-income SESP students, which she co-directs, and a collaboration with the McGaw YMCA program in Evanston, MetaMedia.
Vossoughi also has spearheaded several collaborative and intergenerational efforts both inside and outside the classroom. She co-designed an innovative hybrid course that brings together students from Northwestern with those from Evanston Township High School to investigate questions of educational justice and learning across generations.
Over the past decade, Vossoughi has emerged as a leading voice in the learning sciences, said her doctoral advisor, Kris D. Gutiérrez, distinguished professor and Carol Liu Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, who began working with Vossoughi when she was an undergraduate.
"It is a gift to work with her," Gutiérrez said. "She is that rare scholar whose conceptions of learning and methodological expertise serve as resources for equitable, expansive, and transformational inquiry and collaboration."
Vossoughi's most recent article, co-authored with School of Education and Social Policy professors Megan Bang and Carrie Tzou, argues that learning outside matters, and is grounded in a project called Learning in Places.
The research, published in the journal Science and Children, argues that taking kids outside to learn is not just about changing the location — it is about shifting relationships among children, teachers, families and the socio-ecological systems they inhabit. Learning in Places also shows how understanding local histories and futures, family knowledges, and establishing emotional connections with a place deepens science learning.
Vossoughi has published widely in top education journals and has received several awards for both her teaching and research, including the Outstanding Paper of the Year from the Journal of the Learning Sciences and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award at Northwestern.
She was named the School of Education and Social Policy's Outstanding Professor in 2021 and 2016. She is also a core faculty member in Northwestern's Middle East and North African Studies program.
Vossoughi was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies in 2019 from the American Educational Research Association.
“I had a healthy skepticism towards the presumed objectivity, predictability and control I associated with Western science, and the ways they routinely flatten the vast dimensionalities of learning and learners into something more neatly measurable,” she said during her keynote speech. “I have since found a home in our field, largely through scholars who taught me that the political and ethical concerns drawing me to the study of learning have a place here.”
The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Vossoughi has taught in schools, after-school and summer programs, and helped lead various programs for youth in the Iranian diaspora. She recently interviewed an Iranian colleague and friend who has been working in education and youth psychology in Iran about how young people are interpreting the January 2026 protests and killings, the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, interrupted educations, and their relationships with the future.
On Saturday, May 30, Vossoughi will present research on intergenerational learning at the Global Iranian Diaspora Studies conference at the University of Toronto with Fatemeh Hajnaghizadeh, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education and Social Policy.
Prior to joining the learning sciences faculty at Northwestern in 2014, Vossoughi was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and the Exploratorium, where she led an ethnographic study of after-school programs that blend scientific inquiry, literacy, and the arts.
The induction of ISLS fellows will take place at the opening ceremony of the 2026 ISLS Annual Meeting.
Vossoughi is the sixth SESP faculty member elected to the International Society of Learning Sciences. Others include:
- Megan Bang, 2025
- Nichole Pinkard, 2024
- Brian Reiser, 2021
- Alan Collins, 2021
- Carol Lee, 2021