Maintaining Tensions: Braiding as an Analogy for Mathematics Teacher Educators’ Political Work (original) (raw)
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School Science and Mathematics, 2024
This 2-year qualitative case study focuses on one emergent mathematics teacher leader, Mr. Miller, and his conceptualization of Social Justice Mathematics (SJM). SJM is a justice-oriented pedagogical approach where students simultaneously learn dominant mathematics and explore social injustices to take action toward justice. Using Rodriguez's (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 1998, 35, 589–622) sociotransformative constructivism framework, findings illuminate how dialogic conversation, authentic activity, and metacognition supported Mr. Miller's reflexivity about his positionality, which he described as “upper middle class, highly educated parents, white, male,” in relationship to his students' positionality. He taught in a public charter high school in an urban city in the Northeast United States, where approximately 60% of students identified as Black, 30% white, 10% mixed race, 1% Asian American, 1% Latine, and less than 1% Indigenous, with 60% of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. The article discusses of the importance of reflexivity for teachers and teacher leaders of all backgrounds, and especially when educators of dominant backgrounds work with students of historically marginalized backgrounds. The article calls for further research with more experienced mathematics teacher leaders of various backgrounds and contexts to further investigate justice-centered mathematics teacher leadership.
Journal for Multicultural Education , 2018
Purpose – This study aims to highlight the perspectives of one black male middle-school mathematics teacher, Chris Andrews, about developing black students’ positive mathematics identities during his first year of teaching middle-school mathematics in a predominately black school. The author’s and Chris Andrews’ shared experiences as black Americans opened the door to candid conversations regarding the racialized mathematical experiences of “our” children, as he referred to them during the interviews. Design/methodology/approach – The author used case study methodology (Yin, 2009) to illuminate Chris’s salient academic and personal experiences, approaches to teaching mathematics and ways that he attended to mathematics identity in practice. The author used sociopolitical and intersectional theoretical framings to interpret the data. Findings – Chris’s perspective on teaching mathematics and developing mathematics identity aligned with taking a sociopolitical stance for teaching and learning mathematics. He understood how oppression influenced his black students’ opportunities to learn. Chris believed teaching mathematics to black children was his moral and communal responsibility. However, Chris’s case is one of tensions, as he often espoused deficit perspectives about his students’ lack of motivation and mathematical achievement. Chris’s case illustrates that even when black teachers and black students share cultural referents; black teachers are not immune to the pervasive deficit-oriented theories regarding black students’ mathematics achievement. Research limitations/implications – The findings of this work warrant the need to take intersectional approaches to understanding the ways of knowing that black male teachers bring to their practice, as Chris’s identity as a black person was an interplay between his black identity and other salient identities related to ability and social class. Practical implications – Chris, even while navigating deficit-oriented perceptions of his students, provides an example of bringing a sociopolitical consciousness to teaching mathematics and to support novice black male teachers in their content, pedagogical, and dispositional development. Originality/value – This work adds to the limited body of literature that highlights the experiences ofblack teachers in a subject-specific context, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(STEM) subject areas that have historically marginalized the participation of black people.
Whiteness as a Stumbling Block in Learning to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice
Investigations in Mathematics Learning, 2021
ABSTRACT Using mathematics as a tool to interrogate (in)justice and take action toward a more socially just world in PreK–12 mathematics shows promise for disrupting marginalization of Black and Brown students. Teachers, however, work within broader systems, structures, and discourses that shape their decisions and actions. Consequently, they likely feel imbalance, and attempts to manage tensions may inadvertently perpetuate whiteness – the ideologies that value the white racial group over others. To explore this phenomenon, we asked: How do white teachers learning to teach mathematics for social justice disrupt whiteness in mathematics education, and how do they perpetuate whiteness? We examined two newly practicing teachers’ social justice mathematics lesson planning, enactment, and reflection through a framework for the operation of whiteness in mathematics education. Findings provide insights into the perpetuation and disruption of whiteness in the institutional and labor dimensions of mathematics teaching and learning as teachers sought to balance mathematics and social justice goals and connect to Black and Brown students’ experiences. We discuss implications for the continued learning of social justice teaching and the development of resources to support disruption of whiteness in mathematics education.
Critical Mathematics Education: Extending the Borders of Mathematics Teacher Education
International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 2016
This study describes efforts at two institutions to integrate critical pedagogy within the context of two mathematics content and pedagogy courses for K-8 pre-service teachers (PSTs). The purpose of the curriculum within these courses was to focus PSTs’ attention on how issues pertaining to social justice may be taught within mathematics contexts. The desired goals were for PSTs to: 1) come to appreciate individuals within their own communities as valid practitioners of mathematics; and 2) come to understand the responsibility that they, their school districts, curriculum developers, and others bear to ensure that all students have equitable opportunities to learn mathematics.
Education Sciences
We have interviewed becoming mathematics teachers, in the last semester of their education, asking how they experience their time as teacher students with the focus on inclusive teaching. In their forthcoming daily work, they will be responsible for arranging for inclusive teaching that addresses all the learners’ needs in mathematics. We believe the voices of future teachers are important to include in conversations about how programs prepare future mathematics teachers for the work of teaching in today’s schools and classrooms. We used storylines as a theoretical construct to discuss the socio-political aspects of mathematics teacher education through the lens of two research questions: What storylines emerged in interviews with becoming mathematics teachers in their last semester of teacher education when they talked about teaching in diverse classrooms? What implications might these storylines have on mathematics teacher education? Our analysis made us aware of three important s...
Queering Mathematics: Disrupting Binary Oppositions in Mathematics Pre-service Teacher Education
Borders in Mathematics Pre-Service Teacher Education, 2020
Borders-territorial, political, economic, and ideological-are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are typically regulated, patrolled, maintained, and defended by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. We draw on Thomas Nail's and Gloria Anzaldúa's theories about borders to elaborate on processes of social division around gender and sexuality in mathematics education. The goal in this chapter is to recognize and challenge salient borders around gender, sexuality, and other identity categories in mathematics education and to work toward opportunities for hybridity created by these borders and in the blurring or queering of them. We provide a review of literature documenting the extent to which sexist and heterosexist ideologies patrol, reinforce, and perpetuate borders in mathematics that often marginalize women and queer people. We conclude the chapter with recommendations around how to blur borders around gender and sexuality in mathematics pre-service teacher education.
Understanding the practices of mathematics teacher educators who focus on issues of equity
Journal of Research in Mathematics Education, 2000
Most mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) would agree that teachers must be prepared to provide equitable mathematics instruction to all their students. However, to date, there is not a wide database regarding the practice of MTEs who play an integral role in this preparation. In this paper we argue that additional information is needed about the approaches in which MTEs have addressed or incorporated equity issues such as race, identity, language, and culture as a core part of the preparation of teachers. We further argue for the importance of developing a research agenda that examines the practices of MTEs who teach through this lens of equity, the goal of which would be to build models of professional development that prepare and support other MTEs to develop this specialized knowledge.
Proceedings of the 38th annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education
CITATION: Bidwell, C. R., & Stinson, D. W. (2016). Crossing “the problem of the color line”: White mathematics teachers and Black students. In M. B. Wood, E. E. Tuner, M. Civil, & J. A. Eli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 1273–1280). Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona. In this paper, the authors explore—within an eclectic theoretical framework of critical theory, critical race theory, and Whiteness studies—the life experiences of four White high school mathematics teachers who were " successful " with Black students. The data were collected through three, semi-structured interviews, conducted over a 5-month time period. Through a cross-case analysis of the data, three commonalities among the teachers were identified as being significant contributors to their success in teaching Black students. Two commonalities the participants themselves felt strongly about, and a third became apparent during the cross-case analysis: (a) forming meaningful relationships with students, (b) engaging students in racial conversations, and (c) reflecting both individually and collectively with colleagues on issues of race and racism. Implications for classroom practice and teacher education are discussed.