Agency and Transformative Activist Stance: Developing Collaborative Contestations and Expanding Practices of Numeracy in Teacher Education

• In Event: Enacting Equity-Based Reform Through Humanizing Pedagogies: Supporting Professional Learning Spaces for STEM and Special Educators

Abstract

Objective:
In this paper, I offer insights that support the development and defining of equitable learning spaces. I draw on a transformative activist stance (Stetsenko, 2016), suggesting that humans come to know each other and the world while also engaging in possibilities of transforming our world. I highlight relevant insights from in-service educators during a collaborative research project on critical numeracy—zooming in on areas of contestation during our process that connected to moments of uncertainty, questioning, and emergence of change.

Perspective & Theoretical Framework:
This collaborative research project focused on the development of a framework entitled critical numeracy, defined as a social activity embedded in historically derived social relations integrating mathematics, number, ways of being, knowing, and doing. Critical numeracy amplifies the multiplicity of ways number systems, classifications, logic systems and categorizations have develop as part of human relations; building from the work of many critical mathematics education scholars whose political commitments are to rehumanize mathematical practices and oppose racial capitalism (Martin, 2013, Gutiérrez and Goffney, 2018, Skovsmose, 2012, Gholson, 2016, Kokka, 2020, Bullock and Meiners, 2019). The research process with educators developed through a critical-transdisciplinary framework (Strong et. al, 2016), a heuristic foregrounding the lived experiences of learners (researcher & in-service educator) and challenging prevailing assumptions in science and mathematics teaching, learning, and research. Drawing from a critical-transdisciplinary heuristic further grounded approaches to criticality and, relatedly, of equity.

Mode of Inquiry:
I extend insights from a 6-week collaborative research project with five educators at a dual language school. We engaged in a collaborative process of co-constructing meaning to address ways to disrupt hegemonic practices reifying knower and learner. This research process broke away from the "expert" (researchers) and "non-expert" (participants) dynamic to co-construct meaning together (Stetsenko, 2016). Through this process, we furthered ways in-service educators could deepen engagements with questions such as, ‘How do we know what we know?’ and, ‘How do we understand & alter our practices and the world around us in the process?’

Key Findings & Significance:
In exploring areas of contestation during our sessions connected to a dynamic of uncertainty and questioning, we can deepen a perceptivity around emergencies of change. The areas of contestations that emerged during our process included, moments dehumanization or posturing, examinations of numeracy as a negotiation, questioning particular pedagogical tools in mathematics education, recalling everyday artifacts of numeracy practices, and interference of high stakes testing to ongoing processes. Amidst practices of reflective and collective questioning of previously taken-for-granted tools and assumptions, educators arrived at varied and new understandings of their practice. Through a look into emergent practices and enactment of agency I hope that we can, as teacher educators, reimagine inservice educator development practices across disciplines and equity-based initiatives.

Author

• Atasi Das, Lehman College - CUNY