As increasing numbers of Black immigrant students attend schools in Chile, we examine classroom practices to consider the limits of the mathematics education equity promise for this student ...population. We focus on the practices of a third-grade teacher who participated in professional development for enhancing reform-based mathematics teaching in a racially diverse classroom. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s approach to race, our analysis shows how two technologies of race-power fabricate the Black immigrant child as an uneducable and impossible mathematics learner. We contend that rather than enhancing the inclusion of Black immigrant students, reform-based mathematics teaching might maintain and reinforce racial hierarchies of mathematics ability.
Reform-based discourses in mathematics education have fabricated different subjectivities for teachers such as the "traditional" and the "new" teacher. Professional development programs are proposed ...as effective mechanisms to fabricate the "new" teacher. However, this teacher has proved hard to produce. Thus, the "resistor" teacher has emerged into the field as a way to explain failure within school mathematics reform. In this article, I assume that resistance is a consequential response against particular forms of subjectivation imposed on mathematics teachers. Using conceptual tools from Hall and Foucault, I explore the ways wherein a high school mathematics teacher reinvents meanings of being a mathematics teacher in the context of a professional development program aimed to implement problem-solving instruction. Against the myth of the resistor teacher unwilling to change, what emerges is a process of struggle over meaning. School mathematics reform, considered as an ideological event, becomes a site in which competing meanings about being a mathematics teacher are negotiated, contested, and resisted.
Implementation support strategies such as professional development (PD) are pivotal in guaranteeing the assistance that teachers need to enact mathematics teaching innovations and to secure lasting ...change. Within large-scale efforts an important issue for researchers is to understand how to design and put into effect these implementation support strategies. Although some work has been done to examine the challenges of implementing PD to advance the enactment of mathematics teaching innovations in new school settings, little is known about the multiple challenges novice facilitators face when providing PD for fellow teachers in their local districts and communities. In this paper we report on a 3-year long study that examined how a novice facilitator learned to deal with these challenges and become confident in his new role. Drawing on Graven’s (Educational Studies in Mathematics 57(2), 177–211, 2004) expanded model of learning, a case study and an interpretative approach are used to investigate a novice facilitator’s process of becoming confident. The findings provide evidence that becoming confident is part of an ongoing process of learning through (1) experiencing or constructing new meanings for problem solving as an instructional approach; (2) doing or enacting the instructional approach; and (3) engaging in the core PD practices. Recommendations for the education of PD facilitators in large-scale initiatives are provided.
Are students with special educational needs excluded from the reform promise of "mathematics for all"? This paper explores the discursive production of students with special educational needs in the ...context of professional development (PD) for collaborative problem-solving teaching. We held interviews with Chilean primary school teachers after their participation in PD and used a post-structural analysis to examine them. We turned to policy and institutional practices to understand the disability discourses that were evident. Teachers called on medical and deficit discourses to produce these students as abnormal and problematic in their learning of mathematics. Yet teachers also blurred the lines of categorisation between and within labels of special needs, including other students in these terms. Simultaneously, the reform PD created space for a counter discourse of ability. We suggest PD should help teachers of mathematics resist deficit discourses and see the ways in which experience may run contrary to them.
This paper provides on-the-ground accounts of epistemic violence against Black immigrant children in mathematics classrooms. From a critical feminist perspective, we introduce Dotson’s notion of ...silencing as an enactment of epistemic violence. According to Dotson, one way to enact epistemic violence is to damage a particular group’s ability to speak and be heard. A successful act of communication depends on the audience’s willingness and ability to “hear” the speaker. Therefore, denying this reciprocity in communication is a form of epistemic violence. Using this conceptualization, we conducted a secondary data analysis from a larger study aimed at enhancing teachers’ knowledge and abilities to implement problem-solving teaching. We identify and characterize three practices of silencing Black immigrant students in Chilean mathematics classrooms that damage their agency as knowers and doers of mathematics. Beyond language issues, we show that silencing is a form of anti-Black onto-epistemic violence that prevents Black immigrant students from being recognized as legitimate subjects of knowledge in mathematics classrooms.
The study presented in this paper examines the historical experiences of school inclusion of the Mapuche people in the Chilean educational system. It focuses on the tensions between securing ...high-quality education for indigenous children while simultaneously providing culturally relevant education in ways that their cultural identities and ways of knowing are preserved and sustained over time. A narrative inquiry approach is adopted to document such experiences and to honour the oral tradition in the Mapuche culture. We do so by retrieving the oral memory of two Mapuches in two distinct and traditional communities located in La Araucanía, Chile, the Mapuches' historical land. This oral memory is accompanied by a documental inquiry that sought to examine the historical experiences of schooling as captured in photographs preserved in Santa Magdalena Capuchin Archive located in Altötting, Germany. We use these stories to examine the current efforts of educational inclusion for Mapuche children in Chile and to discuss their limits and possibilities.
This paper examines the limits and possibilities of the discourses and practices of inclusion of Black immigrant students in reform mathematics classrooms. Data from a larger qualitative study ...concerned with the education of mathematics teachers in Chilean marginalized schools is used. Conceptualizations about the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion help us illustrate how reform mathematics teaching entails double gestures of hope (about “us”) and fear (about the “others”). The results provide evidence that educational reforms and policies are embedded in a system of reason which historically fabricated Blacks as invisible and inferior, shaping the chances of inclusion of Black children.
In this paper, we attend to increasing calls to analyse how difference on the basis of race is fabricated in mathematics education within the context of transnational mobility. Racialisation is a ...ubiquitous phenomenon closely related to globalisation which contributes to how the ideal global citizen is being viewed. It occurrs via a wide range of mechanisms, practices, and artefacts. Assuming these elements, we examine the process of racialisation in a Chilean school for adults attended by Black Haitian immigrants. Our analysis reveals the existence of a differential system of school mathematics implemented for Black students that functions as a racialising assemblage which dehumanises this student population. Rather than an empowering tool to access the labour market and secure economic stability, mathematics education may contribute to relegate immigrants to second class citizenship in their host countries.
This Research Commentary draws on the articles in the March 2022 issue of
JRME
, engaging with the notion of labor as a key concept to push the field toward novel understandings of equity in ...mathematics education. We introduce the concepts of identity work and racialized emotions to provide an alternative reading of the articles in that issue, arguing that attention to the interplay of these two concepts is vital to consider issues of equity because mathematics identity intersects with race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other social identities historically marginalized in the classroom. We argue that a focus on such interplay could help to revitalize the discourse on equity in mathematics education across the globe.
