Communicating Mathematically Across Student Differences in the Work of Teaching

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The fundamental demand of teaching is to see, hear, interpret, and extend students' current ideas and understanding. Students differ from their teachers--in age and gender identity, as well as racial identity, language, social class, and experience. These differences compound the complexity of communicating because implicit racial and gender biases affect teachers' orientations to seeing students' capabilities. This project will focus on (1) understanding what it is involved in communicating mathematically with students who represent and come from a range of different communities in the work of teaching and, based on this, (2) supporting teachers to do this work skillfully. This project seeks to understand and support the work of communicating mathematically across difference in ways that disrupt the marginalization of students underrepresented in mathematics. In the first phase of the project, the project will study teaching, with an eye to identifying the interactive mathematical work of teaching across difference. The second phase will involve designing and enacting specific interventions, based on progress in the first phase, to help practicing teachers shift from predominant patterns of overlooking or misinterpreting underrepresented students to focusing on students' strengths and developing fluency and attunement in hearing and talking across difference. Teaching has profound potential to support or impede students' opportunities to learn, as well as to develop their sense of themselves as capable mathematical thinkers and their interest in and persistence with mathematics in and outside of school. Teaching can broaden how mathematics is represented in school and can directly include rather than marginalize students. Project results will help focus teacher education development on these crucial skills, potentially increasing diverse participation in STEM education in profound and far reaching ways. This project is supported by the EHR Core Research Program, which supports fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This project seeks to identify how a special kind of mathematical fluency in action might contribute to improving both theory and practice with respect to the mathematical work of teaching across difference. The project team will analyze videotaped lessons grades 4-8 in a sample of classrooms with significant racial and linguistic diversity. The focus will be on listening to, interpreting, talking with, and responding to students to identify patterns in the demands of such interactive mathematical work. Analysis will focus on characterizing what mathematical fluency and attunement to students might mean and entail in practice. In addition, we will observe and document fifth grade and other mathematics instruction, similarly focusing on communicative work across difference. For the additional data collection, the project will interview samples of students in classrooms to learn how they are experiencing and interpreting their teachers' mathematical communication and interactions. The project will offer specific opportunities for teachers to extend their ability to do this interactive mathematical work and will develop and use tools for tracking their evolving mathematical fluency and attunement.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.