Relinquishing What We Think Is True: Teachers Contesting What Counts as "Real" Math/Science Learning

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

Abstract

Many American schools typify “borderlands” in which people cross boundaries of age, race, social class, family structure, religion or gender in learning from one another (Montecinos, 1995). For children from nondominant backgrounds, the truth of borderlands is this: elements of their home culture will be forsaken if they differ from the knowledge and practices needed for academic success. Redressing this enduring injury requires teachers to reflect in ways that look “both inward at their individual practice and outward at the institutional, cultural, and political contexts in which their practice is situated” (Rousseau & Tate, 2003, p. 211). Engaging teachers in this form of reflection is not simple: It involves recognizing the legitimacy of how the ‘Cultural Other’ (Montecinos, 1995) engages in, for example, mathematics and science at home, and how that is rendered invisible, if not deviant, in relation to western knowledge and practices in school. That is, teacher must see the borders and how their curricular and pedagogical choices lessen or intensify their crossing for non-dominant youth. This analysis focuses on a nine-day seminar developed by the Schools of Engineering and Education at a public university (n=12). The seminar had two objectives: to familiarize secondary mathematics and science teachers with newly-released engineering practice standards; and to demonstrate the value of leveraging relevant knowledge and practices of children’s homes, in school. Casting engineering as “solving human problems” (NGSS, 2013), we posited it as an opportunity to mitigate borders - to engage children in learning that connects school to their experiences, knowledge, or practices. Each morning, engineering faculty presented their research and then led teachers in school-based projects on alternative energy, climate change, etc. Each afternoon, education faculty led small group discussions of empirical research describing how teachers center the social relevance of math (or science) in their teaching (e.g., Gutstein, 2012). Participants then wrote lesson plans reflecting what they learned each day. We first present outcomes of lesson plan coding that show 23 of the 24 lessons failed to build on the knowledge and practices of students. To understand this “failure” of design, video recordings of teachers’ afternoon discussions were analyzed and coded. Video showed teachers regularly contesting the validity of what non-dominant children do in their homes as “true math” or “true science”. We then present three major themes that emerged in videos, which we refer to as sites of contention: 1) the supremacy of western thought; 2) the illegitimacy of non-western science/math practices; and 3) the value of colorblind teaching. Through microanalyses of teachers’ conversations, we argue these sites of contention became spaces to discount the relationship between teaching, learning, and social inequality. What becomes important, then, is understanding the underlying logic of these contentions and in also understanding how the seminar itself may have given rise to them. This analysis thus seeks and offers new ways - theoretically, methodologically and pragmatically - to create opportunities for substantive dialogue and action with teachers that will result in materially improving the educational opportunities for non-dominant youth in mathematics and science.

Authors

• Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Vanderbilt University

• Jessica Tunney, University of California - Irvine

• Meghan Macias, University of California - Irvine