Co-Designing With Families to Challenge Dominant Perspectives and Redistribute Epistemic Authority in Elementary Mathematics (Poster 2)

• In Event: Educational Partnerships as Collective Resistance: Perspectives From Emerging Scholars and Collaborators

Abstract

Objectives
This study seeks to understand how the community and families' mathematical practices can be leveraged to inform a sociopolitical perspective for the implementation of Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI; Carpenter et al., 1996) in the context of a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) with two elementary schools serving 82% of students from Latinx communities.

Perspectives
CGI-aligned instruction requires paying close attention to children's mathematical thinking, valuing that they come to formal education with understandings of how quantities and other elemental mathematical objects work (Carpenter et al., 1996). Nevertheless, as social imaginaries inform ways of perceiving some cultural groups' practices as normative over others (Hand et al., 2013), intuitive mathematical ideas have been historically framed from the perspective of dominant groups. Transforming narratives about what counts as valid mathematical knowledge and who is entitled to do mathematics requires intentional actions where People of Color's ways of knowing and doing mathematics are elevated and valued. For taking this to concrete action, designs grounded in community practices have more potential to be embraced, sustained, and leveraged (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016).

Methods
We partner with a local district that began providing CGI professional development (PD) to all elementary teachers in Summer 2022, and our joint work seeks to support adaptive PD to reduce inequalities in opportunities to learn mathematics. In this poster, we present our use of the Design-Based Implementation Research approach (Fishman & Penuel, 2018) to partner with families and teachers, first learning about mathematical practices at homes and community spaces. Then, families, teachers, and researchers co-designed routines and tools to support an implementation of CGI that cherishes students' multiple identities (Maldonado Rodriguez et al., 2022).
We conducted qualitative analysis of transcripts and notes employing descriptive coding to summarize the primary topics of the data (Saldaña, 2021), which allowed us to document the processes through which community and families' mathematical practices took concrete form to support children's mathematical learning.

Data sources
The initial data set to explore mathematical practices were audio transcripts from two focus groups with parents and notes from two family community walks conducted in English and Spanish. Two bilingual co-design sessions were videotaped and transcribed. The three researchers, one teacher, one parent, and one student, wrote memos after each session.

Results
Families' descriptions of mathematical practices in community spaces about parents' job contexts and cooking, among many others, supported the configuration of co-design sessions. The teams designed math tasks and routines for all grade levels, connecting relevant and familiar contexts using English and Spanish. The process elevated parents' and students' voices in creating learning experiences and was responsive to CGI principles with teachers' and researchers' guidance.

Scientific significance
We explore new ways of implementing mathematics improvement efforts by challenging design authority that traditionally relies solely on teachers. Using familiar contexts acknowledges multiple identities in the classroom, supporting children and their teachers "to see themselves and the people in their communities as mathematically knowledgeable and competent." (Maldonado Rodriguez et al., 2022, p. 197). Finally, co-design spaces with families open opportunities for redistributing mathematical epistemic authority.

Authors

• Patricia Fuentes Acevedo, University of California - Irvine

• Christina Kimmerling, University of California - Irvine

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine