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1. From terrified to comfortable: a fourth-grade teacher’s journey in teaching coding

   https://doi.org/10.51272/pmena.42.2020-323  

   Menke, Jenna; Miller, Claire (December 2020, Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Sacristán, A.I.; Cortés-Zavala, J.C.; Ruiz-Arias, P.M. (Ed.)

   Collective Argumentation Learning and Coding (CALC) is a project focused on providing teachers with strategies to engage students in collective argumentation in mathematics, science, and coding. Collective argumentation can be characterized by any instance where multiple people (teachers and students) work together to establish a claim and provide evidence to support it (Conner et al., 2014b). Collective argumentation is an effective approach for promoting critical and higher order thinking and supporting students’ ability to articulate and justify claims. The goal of the CALC project is to help elementary school teachers extend the use of collective argumentation from teaching mathematics and science to teaching coding. Doing so increases the probability that teachers will integrate coding in regular classroom instruction, making it accessible to all students. This project highlighted Gloria (pseudonym), a fourth-grade teacher from Cohort 1 because of the extent to which she went from fear of coding to fluent implementation. Initially, Gloria was comfortable engaging her students in argumentation, explaining they already used it in mathematics with Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI). However, she was “terrified” about learning to code because she didn’t view herself as proficient with technology. She was willing to overcome her fear of coding because she saw the value in providing her students with coding experiences that would help them develop the necessary skills for our increasingly technological society. In the course of three months, Gloria’s instruction progressed from using simple coding activities to more sophisticated coding platforms. This progression in her coding instruction paralleled the change in her personal feelings about coding as she moved from “terrified” to “comfortable with it”. 

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2. Unveiling Concealable Stigmatized Identities in Class: The Impact of an Instructor Revealing Her LGBTQ+ Identity to Students in a Large-Enrollment Biology Course

   https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.21-06-0162  

   Busch, Carly A.; Supriya, K.; Cooper, Katelyn M.; Brownell, Sara E. (June 2022, CBE—Life Sciences Education)

   Sato, Brian (Ed.)

   Sharing personal information can help instructors build relationships with students, and instructors revealing concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs) may be particularly impactful. One CSI is the LGBTQ+ identity, but there has been no research on the student-perceived impact of an instructor revealing this identity. In this exploratory study conducted at an institution in the U.S. Southwest, an instructor revealed that she identifies as LGBTQ+ to her undergraduate biology course in less than 3 seconds. We surveyed students ( n = 475) after 8 weeks to assess whether they remembered this, and if so, how they perceived it affected them. We used regression models to assess whether students with different identities perceived a disproportionate impact of the reveal. Most students perceived the instructor revealing her LGBTQ+ identity positively impacted them; regression results showed LGBTQ+ students and women perceived greater increased sense of belonging and confidence to pursue a science career. Students overwhelmingly agreed that instructors revealing their LGBTQ+ identities to students is appropriate. This study is the first to indicate the perceived impact of an instructor revealing her LGBTQ+ identity to students in the United States and suggests that a brief intervention could positively affect students. 

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3. FROM UNIVERSITY TO SCHOOL: EXPLORING BEGINNING TEACHERS INTEGRATING REASONING AND PROVING

   Weingarden, M; Buchbinder, O (July 2023, Proceedings of the 46th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Ayalon, M; Koichu, B; Leikin, R; Rubel, L; Tabach, M (Ed.)

   We follow a beginning mathematics teacher, Olive, from the university-based course Mathematical Reasoning and Proving for Secondary Teachers through the supervised internship where Olive taught in her cooperating teacher’s classroom. By drawing upon Activity Theory, we compare her teaching within the two teaching settings, and we examine the opportunities for reasoning and proving she provided to her students in each teaching setting. As a prospective teacher, Olive provided her students opportunities for reasoning and proving. During the internship, these opportunities initially diminished due to institutional and contextual constraints. However, Olive gradually carved out unique paths to engage students with reasoning and proving as her teaching independence increased. 

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4. “I’m going to feel like a failure” – How group dynamics influence one Black girl’s agency

   Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L. Z.; Southerland, S. (January 2023, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting)

   Science learning is thought to be best supported when students are positioned as epistemic agents. Using a case study approach, we explore the experiences of one Black middle school girl and her epistemic efforts and the ways in which her group members’ responses to her efforts either supported or constrained her epistemic agency during small group work in two argumentation lessons. Our findings show that Jessie’s epistemic efforts were not often taken up by her peers in ways that support her epistemic agency, findings that have implications for student learning and engagement in terms of the epistemic work we ask students to engage in, and the instructional strategies that support this work. 

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5. Attention to student emotions and teacher vulnerability as tools to maintain student disciplinary engagement

   Schellinger, J.; Jaber, L. Z.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2023, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2023)

   Research on students’ engagement suggests that epistemic affect--that is, the feelings and emotions experienced in the epistemic work of making sense of phenomena-- should be recognized as a central component of meaningful disciplinary engagement in science. These feelings and emotions are not tangential by-products, but are essential components of disciplinary engagement. Yet, there is still much to understand about how educators can attend and respond to students’ emotions in ways that support disciplinary engagement in science. To inform these efforts, we follow one high school Biology teacher, Amelia, to answer the following question: How does Amelia attend to and support her students’ emotions in ways that support their disciplinary engagement? Data examined include teacher interviews and classroom recordings of two multi-day science lessons. We found that the teacher worked to support her students’ emotions in moments of uncertainty in at least two ways: (1) by attending to these emotions directly, and (2) by sharing her personal experiences and feelings in engaging in similar activities as a science learner. We describe how Amelia made herself vulnerable to students, describing her own struggles in making sense of phenomena, in turn supporting her students to normalize these experiences as part of doing science. 

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