- Year 2019
- NSF Award #1439866
- Registration Current Noyce Scholar
- First Name Marissa
- Last Name Stewart
- Discipline Math
- Institution Vanderbilt University
- School Name and District Currently Teaching MNPS
Abstract
All members of an inclusive mathematics learning community feel welcomed, supported, and valued as they learn; they have full access to learning, and the tools they need to do so successfully and meaningfully. Each member of the community has constructed a math identity shaped by social, cultural, and historical contexts that afford a variety of resources that can be examined and leveraged for the community to build on. As math classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse – linguistically, racially, and socioeconomically – it is of paramount importance that teachers learn how to draw on these resources to create engaging and inclusive learning environments for students from historically marginalized communities. Cultural membership is different for each person; teachers have a responsibility to seek to understand what various cultural memberships mean to and for particular students. It is insufficient and often hurtful to assume knowledge of a person’s values, beliefs or practices based on simplistic understandings of a group to which s/he belongs. If teachers spend time learning about their students’ communities, they can work to redirect attention away from perceived deficits and toward building on their assets. Developing relationships with youth, parents, and communities challenges teachers to invest beyond classroom-based elicitation of students’ prior knowledge and experiences to start to understand and value different ways of knowing. In the classroom, teachers can facilitate groupwork to position students as competent and elicit students’ ideas when they have a better understanding of who their students are and what resources they can leverage in the classroom. With math tasks, it is important to provide opportunities for students to share multiple solution strategies and to value each one. In this poster, we discuss questions we continually ask ourselves, along with some responses we have been learning through our program experiences to work toward creating inclusive math learning environments, such as: What types of teacher-student, student-student, teacher-parent, and teacher-community relationships are supportive of student learning? How can teachers build bridges between multiple cultures represented in the school community? How do teachers attend to and leverage language, race, and culture when designing engaging and inclusive curriculum with historically marginalized students?
