Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item Rupturing antiblackness in mathematics education research: Blackquantcrit as theory, methodology, & praxis(2023) Turner, Blake O'Neal; Liu, Rossina Zamora RZ; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Antiblackness and white supremacy are embedded in mathematics education, which is (re)produced and justified through epistemic violence in research. Research on the “achievement gap” is one well-known example of epistemic violence in mathematics education research where antiblackness is encoded into statistical archives. These quantitative master narratives position Black doers and learners as mathematically illiterate and normalize ideological discourses about Black inferiority, impacting research, policy, and praxis. Thus, this manuscript-style dissertation aligns with calls to advance mathematics education research, policy, and practice toward liberation for Black learners. The three studies in this dissertation employ two distinct but complementary theoretical frameworks, Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) and Quantitative Critical Theory (QuantCrit), to advance our understanding of supporting and creating liberatory mathematics education, particularly for Black doers and learners of mathematics. In the first study, “Common Denominators: QuantCrit as a means of contextualizing antiblackness in mathematics education,” I argue for including Black Critical Theory and Quantitive Critical Theory in mathematics education research. This conceptual paper foregrounds the contributions that QuantCrit and BlackCrit provide to larger critical conversations centering race and antiblack racism in mathematics education and provides a primer on how these frameworks could be applied to mathematics education research by scholars. The second study, “Black Mathematics Teachers and the Master’s House: A Black QuantCrit Analysis,” empirically explores BlackCrit and QuantCrit using secondary data on 74 Black mathematics teachers in an alternative certification program and their dispositions towards teaching racially and culturally diverse students. I partitioned the teachers into structurally similar and practically relevant clusters using K-means clustering. The findings reveal four clusters of Black mathematics teachers: Hegemonic Academics, Individual Actors, Disruptive Conductors, and Caring Custodians. The results of this study provide insights into the utility of intraracial comparisons. Additionally, this study complicates ongoing discourses in education about improving the lives of Black doers, learners, and teachers in mathematics by recruiting and retaining more Black teachers. The third study, “BlackQuantCrit as a North Star: Critical race research workshop for Black graduate students in Mathematics Education,” draws on critical ethnographic methods to explore the cultural practices of four Black graduate students whose research attends to mathematics education (BGMER) as they participate in a collaborative research workshop. The Black graduate students participated in six two-hour workshops as they learned about and applied BlackCrit and QuantCrit to their research. Data analysis (e.g., audio transcripts of the six two-hour workshops, field notes, the researchers' analytic memos, and other resources shared during the workshops) identified three salient themes: Antiblackness is Verb, CRT as North Star, and Care is a Verb. The findings in this study illuminated the types of support BGMERs need to become critical race researchers and how they take up BlackCrit and QuantCrit in their work.Item What Can I Do? Preservice Elementary Teachers Developing Understandings of Self as Mathematics Teacher and Teaching in Context(2012) Neumayer DePiper, Jill; Edwards, Ann R; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In order to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to enact teaching practices that best support all students in learning mathematics, elementary mathematics teacher education must prepare PSTs to navigate the many social, political, and institutional dynamics in today's classrooms. In this research, I theorized that successful negotiation of these dynamics requires that teachers have an understanding of themselves as mathematics teachers, including an examined vision of their goals of mathematics teaching, the social and political contexts of schooling, and the realities of their school contexts. In this study, I explored how PSTs understood themselves as mathematics teachers and teaching through participation in a seminar designed to support critical examination of themselves as mathematics teachers, particularly as within complex realities of schooling and attention to equity and access. The theoretical perspective of performativity (Butler, 1999) was used to understand and support PST identity work and specifically guided the design of the seminar and the case analysis. Each of the four cases offers a unique perspective on how PSTs understood themselves as mathematics teachers and mathematics teaching and how these understandings shifted. The first of three findings across the cases was that PSTs understood themselves and their teaching differently. Specifically, as articulated in the second finding, they understood teaching for equity differently and in relation to their own self-understandings. The third finding is that PSTs' understandings of themselves as mathematics teachers and mathematics teaching shifted. Thus, understanding PSTs' mathematics teacher identities through a theoretical premise of performativity and supporting PSTs in deconstructing these contexts, expectations, and constraints supported some PSTs in repositioning themselves in relation to dominant discourses that framed their understandings of mathematics teaching and in problematizing mathematics teaching. These findings have implications for mathematics teacher education, offering new tools and specific concrete resources to support mathematics teacher critical self-examination. Findings also suggest the need for PSTs to engage in continued identity work and in facilitated opportunities to work at the intersections of mathematics teaching with issues of race, class, and institutional discourses of testing. Further research on operationalizing a critical pedagogy in mathematics teacher education is also needed.Item Pre-service Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching: A Comparison of Two University Mathematics Courses(2009) Lueke, H. Michael; Chazan, Daniel; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One enduring problem in the field of mathematics education is preparing teachers to present mathematics in sufficiently deep and meaningful ways to their students. A focus of this preparation is developing in practitioners sufficient knowledge of mathematics for teaching. Mathematical knowledge for teaching has been theorized widely and is currently the focus of many empirical investigations in the field. This study positions itself within this literature and seeks to connect the research to undergraduate, pre-service elementary school teachers (PSTs), and the content courses which comprise the bulk of their mathematical preparation within a typical university teacher education program. Little is known about the impact that these courses have on teacher knowledge and still less has been studied about the efficacy of different pedagogical--or mathematical--approaches in these courses among PSTs. In order to test claims made in situated learning theory and respond to prevalent political rhetoric about mathematics teacher education, this project compared mathematics courses designed for PSTs in two different universities along three dimensions: (1) Differences in pedagogical and mathematical approaches to developing content knowledge for teaching in PSTs; (2) Resulting differences in PST performance on mathematical knowledge for teaching instruments (3) Resulting differences among PSTs' attitudes about mathematics, teaching, and their perception of the course's relevance to their anticipated work as elementary school teachers. Data from multiple data sources reveals that, though differences were small, PSTs' mathematical knowledge for teaching was substantively different between the two campuses. In addition, the data indicate that PSTs developed different attitudes about mathematics and teaching. Finally, PSTs' evaluated their course's relevance for teaching practice differently. This study suggests that when designing content courses for pre-service teachers, teacher educators should pay close attention to the interaction between mathematical approaches and pedagogical perspectives.