Making It More Complex: Centering Discretionary Spaces in Practice-Based Mathematics Teacher Education Pedagogies

• In Event: Exploring Pedagogical Possibilities at the Intersections of Justice and Practice-Based Teacher Education

Abstract

Purposes & Framework
Driven by the turn to practice-based teacher education (PBTE; Ball & Cohen, 1999), teacher educators (TEs) have utilized pedagogies of practice (PoPs; Grossman et al., 2009) to help teacher candidates (TCs) learn practice through enactment. Scholars in secondary mathematics education have realized Grossman and colleagues’ (2009) articulation of approximations, representations, and decompositions of practice via scripting tasks (Author, 2019), rehearsals (Lampert et al., 2013), case studies, and breaking down practices such as ‘orchestrating discussions’ (Shaughnessy et al., 2019). Through PoPs, TCs experience environments of decreased complexity and authenticity to focus on particular practice(s). While contexts of decreased authenticity have advantages for learning to teach, we must question what is deemphasized (Philip et al., 2018) and constructed as peripheral to the ‘core’ (Dutro & Cartun, 2016) as a result. Within this paper, I synthesize ongoing interrogation of this authenticity and simplification issue to suggest ways forward for mathematics teacher education.

Method & Evidence
While researchers add nuance to TCs’ experiences through considering emotions within representations (Milewski et al., 2019) and attending to the representation of student voice (Campbell et al., 2020), these efforts often attend to mathematics content and less to social structures and identities which shape emotions, language use, or student reasoning. Additionally, some scholars consider dimensions of teacher learning (Hammerness et al., 2005) other than ‘practices’ and ‘tools’ (Ghousseini & Herbst, 2016) though the focus on ‘vision’ and ‘dispositions’ seldom attends to their social situatedness. By failing to represent teachers, students, and classrooms in their full complexities, we have treated race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and their intersections as unimportant to understanding and enacting interactive practices and, thus, for learning to teach. As practice-based scholars, we must actively work to develop PoPs which embrace the complexities of teaching and human existence and help TCs learn to notice, name, confront, and change oppressive systems working within practice through which dominant values become institutionalized.

Warrants
To address these needs within mathematics teacher education, in this paper I highlight, through examples and design considerations, efforts to center PoPs on discretionary spaces (Ball, 2018). Discretionary spaces encompass moments where educators have “the discretion either to reproduce unjust and inequitable social patterns or to interrupt those patterns through their embodied activity” (Kavanagh & Danielson, 2020, p. 71). These include moments such as: Black girls sharing their thinking during mathematics discussions (Ball, 2018), responding to explicit derogatory remarks toward the LGBQ community (Kavanagh, 2018), or addressing students’ (mis)behaviors (Dutro & Cartun, 2016). PoPs centered on discretionary spaces require TCs to deeply consider how to enact responses to problems of practice and trace these moments to oppressive, institutionalized power systems in schools, which is often lacking particularly in the area of mathematics.

Significance
This work responds directly to PBTE critiques by focusing on situated practice, serving as a potential method to develop TCs across multiple dimensions of teacher learning, and moving the field toward preparing TCs to not only enact core practices but to do so through recognizing, critiquing, and confronting social systems.

Author

• Joshua Harlan Karr, West Virginia University