“Who Am I?”: How Do Young Children Represent Their (Mathematical) Identities?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Investigating the Experiences of Students, Teachers, and Coaches in Early Childhood Mathematics

Abstract

There has been an increasing research focus on supporting children’s mathematical identity development. As part of this work, we must seek to understand how children express their unique personal and mathematical identities. One way to do this is by providing students opportunities to create self-portraits defined as drawings containing visible and invisible identity markers representing their identity, beliefs, values, or interests related to themselves and mathematics. Using thematic analysis, we analyzed 69 self-portraits drawn by 12 transitional kindergarteners every six weeks during the school year. The findings suggest that self-portraits provide insight into children’s unique identities and therefore, provides a model for interpreting self-portraits to answer the question “Who am I?” within the context of being a doer of mathematics.

Authors

• Dawn Woods, Oakland University

• Fei Xu, Oakland University