Reframing Students, Mathematics, and Interactions for Antideficit Noticing

• In Event: Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing in Research on Teaching and Teacher Learning

Abstract

In this study, we articulate and illustrate anti-deficit noticing—i.e., noticing that deliberately disrupts deficit discourses, intentionally attending to and elevating the humanity and mathematical brilliance of students of color through routine instructional interactions. Deficit discourses circulate through mathematics education (Authors, date). A variety of culturally dominant frames of activity in mathematics classrooms stem from and reproduce these discourses, for example, framing students as receivers of mathematics whose personal and cultural resources are largely irrelevant.
We define frames as interpretive contexts that support participants in a given situation to understand what kind of task they are engaged in, what kinds of knowledge are relevant or valuable, and what sort of behavior they are expected or entitled to engage in (Greeno, 2009). Framing is the interactive process of attuning to a particular frame and coordinating activities around it. We view framing and other noticing processes (attending, interpreting, responding; see Jacobs et al., 2010) as intimately and bidirectionally linked (Russ & Luna, 2013) and embedded in the context of culturally dominant frames (Hand et al., 2012) (see Figure 1). Here, we highlight reframing—intentionally disrupting and resisting culturally dominant deficit frames—and its connections to anti-deficit noticing.
We focus on the noticing of Oscar, a university mathematics instructor who identified as Hispanic, in a summer bridge program designed for Black and Latinx students. We selected Oscar’s noticing as an “instrumental case” (Stake, 1995, p. 3) to illuminate anti-deficit noticing, because he gave explicit attention to countering deficit discourses through his teaching.
We draw our data from a two-hour interview with Oscar at the end of summer 2018. During the interview, we asked him to identify students who “stood out” to him during the class and recount what he noticed about them. We also elicited what he noticed about specific pieces of student work that he had previously collected and shared with his fellow instructors.
We found that Oscar was aware of culturally dominant frames that contributed to dehumanizing students of color, and that he intentionally sought to reframe students, mathematics, and classroom interactions through his instruction. For example, he framed students as full human beings who brought many resources to the table. This framing interacted with his attending to students as individuals with unique personalities and participation styles; his interpreting students’ ways of being as resources; and his responding by actively leveraging those resources to support students’ learning in the classroom (for further detail, see Table 1). We also found that the local context of the summer bridge program was critical in supporting Oscar’s anti-deficit noticing.
Our study thus foregrounds multiple layers of sociopolitical context for noticing, complementing the cognitive emphasis of existing studies of teacher noticing (e.g., Jacobs et al., 2010; Russ & Luna, 2013). Additionally, we highlight the damaging impacts of deficit discourses and challenge them by showcasing anti-deficit noticing of students of color, by a teacher of color.

Authors

• Nicole Louie, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Naomi Jessup, Georgia State University

• Aditya P. Adiredja, The University of Arizona