Workshop

Success rates in mathematics as well as recruitment and retention rates in the mathematics pipeline are low at all education levels and are, across predictable demographics, disproportionately low for students who are women, Latin@, Black, American Indian, recent immigrants, emergent bilinguals/multilinguals, and poor. Efforts to address these low rates often focus on programmatic solutions such as creating mentoring or bridge programs to address perceived deficiencies. While these programs achieve some success, evidence suggests that they may not substantially improve students’ subsequent success in mathematics or meaningfully address the ways that students experience mathematics instruction. The 2017 CIME workshop will focus on observations of mathematics classrooms through the lens of equity. Specifically, we will use observation as a tool for understanding and improving imbalances of access, participation, and power in mathematics teaching and learning. In doing so, we seek to better understand students’ experiences in mathematics classrooms in order to improve academic success, recruitment and retention, and meaningful experiences for historically marginalized populations. Five questions structure the highly interactive design of the workshop: What does it mean to create an equitable classroom environment? How can the structure of classroom interactions lead to imbalances of access, identity, and power in mathematics teaching and learning? How can such structures be rebuilt to better serve all students? How might observations of mathematics instruction help us to identify power dynamics in classrooms? What language is helpful to describe interactions in mathematics classrooms? What might we learn from observations about how culture and identity are developed for some students but not others? What do classroom observations reveal about how instruction supports or discourages engagement in mathematics for students of different backgrounds? What does it mean to observe interactions in a mathematics classroom with an eye towards equity? What language is helpful to describe interactions in mathematics classrooms? How do we observe and describe interactions among students, between students and mathematics, between students and instructors, and between students and resources (i.e., textbooks, computers, chalkboards, manipulatives)? What professional experiences can support mathematics instructors to learn how to observe for, describe, interpret, and productively address interactions in the mathematics classroom from the lens of equity? What professional experiences can support mathematics instructors to increase the number of equitable interactions and decrease the number of inequitable ones in their classrooms? What measures might be useful in tracking our progress in learning to see, describe, interpret, and productively address (in)equitable interactions in mathematics classrooms? What measures and tools might be useful in tracking the impacts on instruction and student learning? How might we develop infrastructure to help with this work (video library, faculty resources, etc.)?   Group Photo