Learning to Build: Understanding the Role of Place in Urban Mathematics Reform

• In Event: 66.078 - Considering the Social, Spatial, and Political: Conceptualizations of Research and Practice in Urban Mathematics Education

Abstract

William Tate (2004) has argued the need to take an engineering approach to opportunity to learn in mathematics education. Such an approach would involve a “learn to build” orientation that uses existing research to design more effective and equitable systems. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of this engineering perspective with regard to mathematics education reform in urban schools. As Gamoran et al. (2003) acknowledge, we have multiple “existence proofs” of individual classrooms in which teaching for understanding occurs in mathematics. What we lack is a clear model of the factors that contribute to the success of those classrooms from an organizational perspective. Moreover, the examples of successful school-level reform are largely drawn from non-urban (either suburban or rural-suburban) settings, reflecting the specific challenges of mathematics education reform in urban schools (Gamoran et al., 2003). Thus, there is an urgent need to develop and test models that can be used for the design of more effective urban schools and districts (Cobb & Smith, 2008; Tate, 2008).
In this paper, I use the case of one urban school to illustrate the factors shaping mathematics reform at the school level. I describe several conditions that appear to be related to the process of reform in the case setting, including teacher shortages, teacher quality, teacher turnover, assessment policies, accountability measures, and local patterns of educational attainment. Using this case as an example, I submit that mathematics education scholars interested in school-level reform must acknowledge and account for the role of policy at various levels. Further, I submit that the case described in the paper lends further support to Tate’s (2008) call for geospatial models of urban mathematics education. Finally, knowledge of the geospatial context also points to the role of intergenerational factors in shaping reform in the case setting.
Drawing from the example of the case school, I argue that “place matters” in the study of urban mathematics education (Hogrebe & Tate, 2012). Urban schools are situated at the nexus of a myriad of factors that influence the capacity to move from “existence proofs” of classrooms to whole-school implementation of mathematics reform. Yet, as Cobb and Jackson (2011) assert, “the issue of how to support instructional improvement on a large scale continues to be under-researched. As a consequence, research can currently provide only limited guidance to district and school leaders who aim to improve the quality of mathematics teaching” (p. 6). Thus, there is a need for scholarship to support model development and testing to help us “learn to build” in urban spaces (Tate, 2004, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this conversation and to outline some design considerations in the effort to build more successful mathematics reform in urban schools.

Author

• Celia Rousseau Anderson, The University of Memphis