Critical Improvisation: Challenging the Past to Imagine Futures in Teacher Learning for Rehumanizing Mathematics Education

• In Event: 43.033 - Roles of Tools, Resources, and Routines for Supporting Teachers' Professional Learning

Abstract

Improvisational theory accounts for the interactional relation between people's historical experiences and their imagined futures. In mathematics classrooms, improvisation shapes how teachers embrace and/or deny their students' histories of marginalization, resistance, and power. A critical improvisation lens, which I define as the continuous process of unapologetically challenging dehumanizing norms through strong and caring relationships, can support mathematics teachers in organizing learning that leverages students' histories, their diverse epistemologies, and their sense of possibility in the vast, and sometimes seemingly disjoint, ways that students show up in mathematics classrooms. The findings provide insights into how teacher learning in critical improvisation, for the benefit of racialized and minoritized mathematics students, works toward re-humanizing mathematics teaching and learning.

Author

• Ashley Danielle Scroggins, University of Colorado - Boulder