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1. A Sociocultural Perspective on Beginning Teachers Enacting Reasoning and Proving Practices

   Weingarden, M.; Buchbinder, O. (January 2022, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Karunakaran, S. S.; Higgins, A. (Ed.)

   The critical role of teachers in supporting student engagement with reasoning and proving has long been recognized (Nardi & Knuth, 2017; NCTM, 2014). While some studies examined how prospective secondary teachers (PSTs) develop dispositions and teaching practices that promote student engagement with reasoning and proving (e.g., Buchbinder & McCrone, 2020; Conner, 2007), very little is known about long-term development of proof-related practices of beginning teachers and what factors affect this development (Stylianides et al., 2017). During the supervised teaching experiences, interns often encounter tensions between balancing their commitments to the university and cooperating teacher, while also developing their own teaching styles (Bieda et al., 2015; Smagorinsky et al., 2004; Wang et al., 2008). Our study examines how sociocultural contexts of the teacher preparation program and of the internship school, supported or inhibited proof-related teaching practices of beginning secondary mathematics teachers. In particular, this study aims to understand the observed gap between proof-related teaching practices of one such teacher, Olive, in two settings: as a PST in a capstone course Mathematical Reasoning and Proving for Secondary Teachers (Buchbinder & McCrone, 2020) and as an intern in a high-school classroom. We utilize activity theory (Leont’ev, 1979) and Engeström’s (1987) model of an activity system to examine how the various components of the system: teacher (subject), teaching (object), the tasks (tools), the curriculum and the expected teaching style (rules), the cooperating teacher (community) and their involvement during the teaching (division of labor) interact with each other and affect the opportunities provided to students to engage with reasoning and proving (outcome). The analysis of four lessons from each setting, lesson plans, reflections and interviews, showed that as a PST, Olive engaged students with reasoning and proving through productive proof-related teaching practices and rich tasks that involved conjecturing, justifying, proving and evaluating arguments. In a sharp contrast, as an intern, Olive had to follow her school’s rigid curriculum and expectations, and to adhere to her cooperating teacher’s teaching style. As a result, in her lessons as an intern students received limited opportunities for reasoning and proving. Olive expressed dissatisfaction with this type of teaching and her desire to enact more proof-oriented practices. Our results show that the sociocultural components of the activity system (rules, community and division of labor), which were backgrounded in Olive’s teaching experience as a PST but prominent in her internship experience, influenced the outcome of engaging students with reasoning and proving. We discuss the importance of these sociocultural aspects as we examine how Olive navigated the tensions between the proof-related teaching practices she adopted in the capstone course and her teaching style during the internship. We highlight the importance of teacher educators considering the sociocultural aspects of teaching in supporting beginning teachers developing proof-related teaching practices. 

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2. Transformations in Elementary Teachers' Pedagogical Reasoning: Studying Teacher Learning in an Online Graduate Program in Engineering Education

   Watkins, Jessica; Portsmore, Merredith; Swanson, Rebecca (January 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-back car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in. 

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3. Becoming Somebody in STEM: Developing a cultural of criticality in the space between person and history

   Calabrese Barton, A. (April 2018, American Education Research Association)

   Autumn, a young white woman growing up in multi-generational poverty in an economically challenged midwestern city, has authored a STEM-empowered life against the dominant sociohistorical narrative in American society. She has attended public schools that served significant populations living in high poverty – overcrowded classrooms, high teacher turnovers, out-of-field teaching, and limited STEM resources. Yet, she has authored herself into STEM despite these mitigating circumstances. Autumn is currently a high school senior with aspirations to become an engineer or a hairdresser working in an eco-salon. She spends part of her time after school in a makerspace housed in her local community center, building things to solve other people’s problems. She reminds us that her out-of-school efforts to participate in STEM exist worlds away from schooling. However, she takes the optimistic view that if she could tell teachers about her out-of-school STEM experiences, her teachers might be better able to help her and her peers serve the interests and needs of her community, as well as see Autumn’s potential in STEM. Now a rising 12th grader, we have followed Autumn since 5th grade through school and afterschool. As she grew older, she became more interested in helping us to document and tell her story. She is an author on this paper. Also during this time, Autumn has shifted from wanting to be a hair designer (5th grade) to wanting to own a “green” (environmentally friendly) hair salon (8th grade), to considering engineering as a possible career (10th grade). Autumn has struggled with being labeled “a girl in the background” and someone whom her mother described in 7th grade as “if she would just get Ds, I would be happy.” However, over the past 6 years, Autumn has engaged in an ever-increasing range of STEM-rich actions and relationships, including building a Little Free STEM Library, leading workshops on energy efficiency, making educational movies for her community to teach about green energy, and writing for her afterschool STEM club blog. We are interested in Autumn’s engagement with others in these activities over time and space, and how they shape her own and her community’s engagement in STEM. The overarching question that guides this manuscript is: What are the interactional forces that operating across space and time that influence Autumn’s becoming in STEM, as a white girl, growing up in multi-generational poverty in a Midwestern city. Using Holland & Lave’s (2009) two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles”–we examined several pivotal events, and the micro-dynamics at play, identified by Autumn with respect to becoming in STEM. We sought to make sense of the ways in which Autumn’s STEM experiences were carried out in local practice but also enacted against the broader background of cultural/historical narratives. In this process we traced Autumn’s core commitments-in-practice in STEM & Community. We also examined how these core commitments-in-practice led, at times, to conflict and new forms of “contentious local practice” (LCP) as these commitments-in-practice pushed back against particular local, historical and sociocultural contexts. 

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4. Becoming Somebody in STEM: Developing a cultural of criticality in the space between person and history

   Calabrese Barton, Angela (April 2018, American Education Research Association)

   Autumn, a young white woman growing up in multi-generational poverty in an economically challenged midwestern city, has authored a STEM-empowered life against the dominant sociohistorical narrative in American society. She has attended public schools that served significant populations living in high poverty – overcrowded classrooms, high teacher turnovers, out-of-field teaching, and limited STEM resources. Yet, she has authored herself into STEM despite these mitigating circumstances. Autumn is currently a high school senior with aspirations to become an engineer or a hairdresser working in an eco-salon. She spends part of her time after school in a makerspace housed in her local community center, building things to solve other people’s problems. She reminds us that her out-of-school efforts to participate in STEM exist worlds away from schooling. However, she takes the optimistic view that if she could tell teachers about her out-of-school STEM experiences, her teachers might be better able to help her and her peers serve the interests and needs of her community, as well as see Autumn’s potential in STEM. Now a rising 12th grader, we have followed Autumn since 5th grade through school and afterschool. As she grew older, she became more interested in helping us to document and tell her story. She is an author on this paper. Also during this time, Autumn has shifted from wanting to be a hair designer (5th grade) to wanting to own a “green” (environmentally friendly) hair salon (8th grade), to considering engineering as a possible career (10th grade). Autumn has struggled with being labeled “a girl in the background” and someone whom her mother described in 7th grade as “if she would just get Ds, I would be happy.” However, over the past 6 years, Autumn has engaged in an ever-increasing range of STEM-rich actions and relationships, including building a Little Free STEM Library, leading workshops on energy efficiency, making educational movies for her community to teach about green energy, and writing for her afterschool STEM club blog. We are interested in Autumn’s engagement with others in these activities over time and space, and how they shape her own and her community’s engagement in STEM. The overarching question that guides this manuscript is: What are the micro-dynamics that produce and challenge inequalities in Fall’s becoming in STEM, as a white girl, growing up in multi-generational poverty in a Midwestern city. Using Holland & Lave’s (2009) two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles”–we examined several pivotal events, and the micro-dynamics at play, identified by Autumn with respect to becoming in STEM. We sought to make sense of the ways in which Autumn’s STEM experiences were carried out in local practice but also enacted against the broader background of cultural/historical narratives. In this process we traced Autumn’s core commitments-in-practice in STEM & Community. We also examined how these core commitments-in-practice led, at times, to conflict and new forms of “contentious local practice” (LCP) as these commitments-in-practice pushed back against particular local, historical and sociocultural contexts. 

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5. Developing Science Classroom Expectations That Encourage Risk‐Taking for Learning Science Together

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21990  

   Alzen, Jessica L; Buell, Jason Y; Edwards, Kelsey; Griesemer, Chris D; Zhang, Yang; Passmore, Cynthia; Penuel, William R; Reiser, Brian J (June 2025, Science Education)

   ABSTRACT Reform‐oriented science classrooms encourage environments in which students engage in a collective enterprise of making sense of their science ideas together. Teachers who strive for these sorts of environments support students in collaboratively constructing and answering their own questions about phenomena and making sense of competing ideas together. However, to engage with one another productively, students must ask questions, share incomplete thoughts, and comment on each other's ideas, all of which can be seen as risky and unfamiliar behavior that may result in feelings of uncertainty or other negative classroom consequences. We conduct an explanatory case study using student and teacher interviews, teacher surveys, and classroom video collected over 2 years to investigate how one teacher used classroom norms to establish and maintain a culture in which students appeared committed to taking risks to improve their collective knowledge‐building. We found that norms were one practical tool the teacher used to encourage students to take risks and that also seemed helpful for negotiating individual and group uncertainty. Norms were also tools the teacher used to ensure that she and her students had similar expectations for classroom engagement. This study practically addresses some key challenges teachers face in enacting reform‐oriented science teaching and offers suggestions for how continued research regarding norms and uncertainty can continue to further science reform efforts. 

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