The Unintended Consequences of Mathematizing Play

• In Event: 53.076 - What Should Be the "Mathematics" in Mathematics Education?

Abstract

Nationalist concerns about financial interests (Berlinski, Galiani, & Manacorda, 2008), studies that demonstrate how early opportunities to engage with mathematics support positive outcomes later (Jordan, Kaplan, Locuniak, & Ramineini, 2009), and deficit notions about children’s supposed lack of experiences in their homes and communities are driving policies that are making preschools more academic - what the OECD refers to as schoolification (2006). Yet, few in the policy arena are questioning the wisdom of taking time from play to have young children do mathematics. The ‘taken as true’ mathematics education policy documents state that there should be a balance of teacher-directed and child-centered mathematics instruction (National Research Council, 2009). At the same time, these documents suggest that teachers are not prepared to respond effectively to the mathematics children engage with in play, which results in an over-emphasis on teacher-directed instruction. Our reaction has been to work with practicing and prospective teachers to learn to recognize and mathematize children’s play so as to minimize teacher-directed instruction. Our thinking was that this practice will address demands for mathematics learning while still providing children opportunity to engage in play - but our recent study of the gendered nature of mathematics learning opportunities in play has us wonder about unintended consequences. A year ago, four pre-kindergarten teachers graciously opened their classrooms for us to video record children’s mathematics learning in play. In our initial analysis, we found that the materials children chose to play with and the classroom spaces they chose to play in provided opportunities for some children to engage in ‘mathematics’ more than others and those differences were highly gendered. To further explore this, we used positioning theory (Herbel-Eisenmann, et al., 2015) to analyze child-teacher interactions during free play to identify communication acts that contributed to storylines about what is mathematical, who engages in mathematics, and how everyday interactions position some children as doers of mathematics and how some are othered by their ‘lack of take up’ of mathematics. We found that children we identified as boys were more likely to allow teachers to mathematize their play than were children we identified as girls. ‘Boys’ responded to teachers’ mathematical questions about what they were doing, whereas, ‘girls’ were more likely to resist teachers’ efforts to mathematize their play. And, once ‘girls’ resisted, teachers were likely to drop the conversation or simply provide an answer to their own question. From these differing communication acts and acceptance or rejection of being positioned as a doer of mathematics, we wonder whether the good intentions of mathematizing play are resulting in teachers seeing ‘girls’ and ‘girls’ seeing themselves as less mathematical – as early as four-years-old. Based on the outcomes, we suggest rethinking what counts as mathematical materials and reframing children’s resistance to mathematizing play from a ‘lack of take up’ to ‘acts of agency’. In doing so, we deconstruct deficit notions of children who do not engage in the mathematics we expect so that we support them as they develop their own notions of themselves as mathematical beings.

Authors

• Anita A. Wager, Vanderbilt University

• Anne Karabon, University of Nebraska Omaha