Student Positioning: Practicing Equity in Mathematics Teaching

• In Event: Exploring Equity in the Context of Mathematics Teacher Education Practice: A Town Hall Discussion

Abstract

Purpose
There is a growing call to improve preservice teachers’ (PSTs) preparation by helping them learn to interrupt classroom-based inequities. One way that PSTs may be taught to interrupt inequities is through examining student positioning. Positioning is defined as “the ways in which people use action and speech to arrange social structures [and status]” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Positioning work is embedded throughout a teacher’s practice. This may seem abstract and opaque to PSTs. Drawing on Mathematics Discourse in Secondary Classroom (MDISC): A Practice-based Multi-media Resource for Professional Learning (Herbel-Eisenmann et al. 2017), we focus PSTs’ attention on the subtle messages that students receive about their ability to succeed in mathematics. These messages can be communicated in student-to-student positioning, where students signal their status to each other; teacher-to-student positioning, where teachers use their institutional and positional authority to set and reinforce positions; and positioning done by the mathematics curriculum , where students get messages about what it means to know mathematics (p. 82 - 87). This paper contributes to research on mathematics teacher education by analyzing  PSTs’ interactions with activities that expose power through positioning in teaching and learning.
Background
This paper is based on work in a secondary mathematics methods course designed to teach practices that support the development of young people as mathematics doers. One way that we engage PSTs in interrupting inequities is through discourse moves that imagine teaching beyond telling. In particular, per the MDISC materials, we focus on waiting, inviting, revoicing, asking other students to revoice, probing students’ thinking, and creating opportunities to engage with one another’s reasoning. One goal we adopted from MDISC was to encourage our PSTs to consider how using these discourse moves positions students and creates different opportunities to learn in small-group and whole-group contexts. Through engagement in the course and course materials, PSTs consider how they can be deliberate about setting mathematical and social goals, as well as norms that support inclusion and mathematical competence (Herbel-Eisenmann et al. 2017, p. 82-87).
Description of Focal Lesson
We engaged secondary mathematics PSTs in analyzing discourse moves made by students and teacher and how these moves position students in the discussion. We used transcripts to focus PSTs on student and teacher talk as a starting point, rather than on student or teacher behavior. We were interested in learning about the affordances and challenges for both teacher educators and PSTs in exploring equitable teaching through positioning practices.

Preliminary Findings
Preliminary analyses of our teaching of the focal lesson suggest that PSTs grew in their ability to:
• see mathematics classrooms as highly stratified spaces.
• recognize student positioning through written transcripts and case studies.
• consider positioning abstractly in written lesson plans.
But, we also found that PSTs were less able to problematize student positioning when watching a video.
Scholarly significance
This presentation unpacks potential challenges and affordances that both teacher educators and pre-service teachers face in analyzing student positioning in mathematics classes and how this affects students’ learning opportunities.

Authors

• Amber Willis, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Maisie L. Gholson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor