9 Supporting Elementary Teachers’ Enactment of Equitable Mathematics and Science Instruction

Faculty Mentor: Lauren Barth-Cohen (Educational Psychology, University of Utah)

Background and Theoretical Framework

Promoting equity-oriented teaching practices (EOTP), or teaching that appreciates student diversity and acknowledges their lived experiences, is a necessary undertaking within science and mathematics teacher education. The disciplines of science and mathematics are often assumed to be “objective” and, therefore, disconnected from equity, or tensions related to access for historically underrepresented and underserved populations. However, teacher education that utilizes EOTP has resulted in greater learning outcomes within these fields. There is a growing need to develop these teacher education practices to encourage pre-service teachers’ (PSTs), or teachers in training, to address issues of equity when they appear in PK-12 classrooms. To do so, we utilized a framework known as culturally grounded pedagogy (CGP). CGP refers to teaching practices that 1) leverage students’ multiple strengths and competencies, 2) explicitly value students’ diverse lived experiences and ways of knowing or participating, including language and cultural practices, 3) attend to classroom power and status dynamics to create equitable learning opportunities, and 4) aim to diversify curriculum and challenge dominant perspectives (Aguirre et al., 2013; Banks, 2019; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995; 2014; Paris, 2012). These practices are known as the features of CGP and are often present in classrooms that utilize EOTP.

There are roadblocks to discussing and implementing the features of CGP with PSTs. For instance, merely discussing CGP and equity in the classroom leaves PSTs’ understanding as highly theoretical and difficult to practically carry out. It is beneficial to utilize teaching cases, or hypothetical scenarios, that are developed through collaboration with in-service teachers (ISTs) (Shulman, 1992). This empowers ISTs to reflect upon their experiences of classroom equity and construct cases that present PSTs with realistic and tangible scenarios. PSTs are asked to engage with these cases in the methods courses that outline teaching practices in math and science. This project aimed to analyze the extent to which one such case succeeded in eliciting PST classroom conversation of the features of CGP discussed during its development.

Methods

To design the case, three two-hour long IST workshops were hosted over a period of three weeks. The 6 IST participants were recruited from local school districts and given an introduction to CGP and example cases. They were then asked to collaborate in pairs and design a case.

This case was later implemented into the recorded PST methods class. The 11 PSTs were asked to review the case and draft their own responses before discussing the prompts, first in small groups and then with the class as a whole.

A thematic coding scheme was used to analyze the audio, video, and written data from the IST workshops and PST classroom discussions. The process involved highlighting and summarizing relevant comments before extracting common themes to be turned into a codebook. The codes were then applied to the data and analyzed.

Results

The findings were mixed, revealing the emergence of a continuum for the features of CGP related to their discussion. Features 1 (leveraging student strengths) and 3 (dismantling classroom hierarchies) were of most relevance to the case, both in its IST workshop development and PST classroom discussion. Many of the comments made by ISTs and PSTs alike were located on one end of the continuum where early versions of the feature held significant room for development. Other comments were on the opposite end, where discussion was a target version that more aligned with the instructional goals of the class. Less frequent were emerging versions that still held room for improvement but were moving more in the direction of the target than their early version counterparts. Where the PST classroom comments fell on the curriculum mirrored that of the IST workshop discussions during the case’s development.

Discussion and Implications

We considered a number of theories for why the data from the IST workshops and PST classroom data presented in the ways it did. For instance, much of the discussion of the cases centered around the issue of student grouping. We suggested that this might be due to the nature of the case, which explicitly mentioned student grouping. It might also have been a significant focus because it is a particularly intriguing issue for teaching populations for whom student grouping is the source of classroom conflict. Additionally, there was much attention paid to student differences that do not forefront equity, such as student personality, rather than differences rooted in structural inequity, such as race and gender. We considered that this might be due to feelings of discomfort surrounding such topics. Indeed, the literature suggests that practices such as race-evasion and silencing can be found in classroom settings (Castagno, 2014; Chang-Bacon, 2021). Furthermore, the transcripts revealed a heavy presence of hedging, or linguistic cues of uncertainty, within the IST workshop conversations, suggesting some hesitancy to discuss inequities based on race and gender.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that there is still room for improvement in the development and implementation of cases that aim to foster the use of CGP in teaching populations. Further research will aim to continue promoting EOTP and CGP in PK-12 math and science education.

Bibliography

Aguirre, J., Mayfield-Ingram, K., & Martin, D. (2013). The impact of identity in K-8 mathematics: Rethinking equity-based practices. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Banks, J. A. (2019). An introduction to multicultural education (Sixth edition). Pearson.

Castagno, A. E. (2014). Educated in whiteness: Good intentions and diversity in schools. University of Minnesota Press.

Chang-Bacon, C. K. (2021). “we sort of dance around the race thing”: Race-evasiveness in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 73(1), 8–22.

Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106-116.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.p2rj131485484751

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244

Shulman, L. S. (1992). Toward a pedagogy of cases. In J. L. Shulman (Ed.), Case method in teacher education (pp.1-32). New York: Teacher College Press.