From Practice to Research and Around Again: Transformative Methodologies in Dehumanizing Contexts

• In Event: 58.052 - Transforming the Research-Practice Connection in Mathematics Classrooms With Nondominant Students

Abstract

The experiences that students have in schools, particularly those from non-dominant communities, have been dehumanized. What research frames as problems of teaching or learning obscures a facet of these problems that has to do with dehumanizing students’ and teachers’ experiences in schools. One can consider this question: In what non-school contexts do we find problems of teaching or learning? The non-school contexts where teaching and learning occur—e.g., cooking with one’s mother, riding a bike with our favorite cousin, fixing a flat tire with one’s father—are not dehumanized. Humans—and everything that takes to be a human—count here!
In this presentation I will discuss the phenomenon of re-humanizing experience in mathematics classrooms by drawing on two related constructs. These constructs help me understand my transformations as a mathematics education researcher working with teachers, students, and graduate research assistants in contexts where dehumanization prevails. The first, presencia plena/conciencia abierta [full presence/open consciousness) (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 2011) serves to remind us of how, in general, humans go through experiences without being fully present in the experience (e.g., being unaware of our breathing). The experiences of teaching, learning, and researching in mathematics classrooms are not the exception, hence the importance of reconnecting ourselves with these experiences. The other construct—presencing (Scharmer, 2009)—refers to the ability of social groups to reinvent their being together from talking nice (which does not change the context) to talking real (which reinvents the rules of one’s activity). As a participant of this research project, I have seen that as we transform, we are also transformed. In this presentation I will discuss a number of such transformations, including my personal epistemological and methodological revisions (e.g., why I cannot remain unaffected as a researcher when my work is done in re-humanized contexts?); interrogations of the nature of the connection between practice and research (why are we more concerned with research affecting practice but rarely do we think about how practice can and should affect research?); and the cascading nature of participatory design-based research (e.g., why in the process of occasioning transformations in the mathematics classroom, these transformations affect how I educate my own awareness as a researcher?) (Gattegno, 1970).
Traditional research is not concerned with mutual effects of a change because the focus is on isolating something affecting something else in a linear, one directional way. This is typically achieved by decomposing a phenomenon into separate components for analytical purposes. This decomposition has become commonplace in educational research, for example the decomposition of the teaching practice (Grossman, et al., 2009) found in many research projects. This way of doing research is much closer to dehumanizing contexts because the human activity that occurs in these contexts (e.g., teaching, learning, researching) is of a complex nature. As Mason (2016) recently reminded us, “we desperately need research which sees and conceives of the classroom as an organic whole, in which both individuals and the collective display qualities of the complexity (life)” (p. 298).

Author

• Higinio Dominguez, Michigan State University