Teaching Mathematics for Equity and Social Justice: Prospective Teachers' Identities in Their Foregrounds

• In Event: Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: Negotiating Issues of Power, Race, and Culture Within Teacher Education

Abstract

Given the critical need for teaching mathematics for equity and social justice with culturally and linguistically diverse children, the purpose of this study is to investigate identity development of early childhood prospective teachers in a mathematics methods course. Teacher identity was conceptualized by backgrounds and foregrounds of prospective teachers. The ambiguous interplay between two suggest a multilayered, fragmented and inconsistent nature of teacher identity in between spaces. In this paper, one prospective teacher’s story is presented as an exemplar case. Data sources were the written work collected during the course and researcher’s field notes. The results revealed that she did not only have hopes and aspirations to teach mathematics for equity and social justice but also fears, frustrations and tensions

Author

• Ayse Yolcu, University of Wisconsin - Madison