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Better understanding preservice teachers’ current perceptions toward students with disabilities will allow mathematics educators to create specific strategies for helping students to develop perceptions promoting inclusive classroom environments. To access these perceptions, we developed an online survey that asks respondents about their knowledge of disabilities, their experiences with people with disabilities, and decisions they would make based on classroom scenarios that involve students with disabilities. We gave this survey to 14 preservice secondary school teachers (PSTs). Key findings include five PSTs presented an inclusive perception toward students with disabilities, seven PSTs presented an ambiguous perception and the perceptions of two PSTs remained unknown. All but the latter two PSTs provided at least some evidence of their willingness to fully include students with disabilities in their mathematics classrooms. 

Our aim is to shed light on the impact that Eurocentric ideas and practices of dominant social groups have on mathematics education research. We suggest that the unintentional advancement of scholarly work that centers colonization and whiteness requires intentional intervention to disrupt. We identify rationales that mathematics education scholars give for not attending to equity in their work and provide actionable steps that can be taken to promote the practice of explicitly attending to issues of equity and justice in mathematics education research. We conclude with a metaphor and an invitation for our international colleagues to join us in decolonizing mathematics education research. 

Negative perceptions held by teachers toward students with disabilities create environments that make students feel uncomfortable and often incapable of participating actively in classrooms. Much of the research about these perceptions is focused on teachers of students with learning disabilities, which leaves out teachers’ perceptions toward students with other disabilities. We are developing a responsive online survey to access what mathematics teachers identify as disabilities and their behavior toward students with disabilities in their classroom. In this paper, we describe the process we have developed for constructing this survey. We also share our conceptualization of the relationship between teachers’ perceptions and equity affirmations toward disability, and the results of applying that conceptualization to our research context. 

Past research has identified factors that help maintain the cognitive demand of tasks, including drawing conceptual connections. We investigated whether teachers who were engaging in the teaching practice of building—and thus focusing the class on collaboratively making sense of their peers’ high-leverage mathematical contributions—drew conceptual connections at a higher rate than has been found in previous work. The rate was notably higher (54% compared to 14%). By comparing multiple enactments of the same task, we found that this higher rate of drawing conceptual connections seemed to be supported by (1) eliciting student utterances that delve more deeply into the underlying mathematics, (2) giving students more time to explore the underlying math, and (3) using previously learned abstractions to help move the class toward understanding the new abstract concepts underlying a task. 

We used videotaped enactments of high cognitive demand tasks to investigate whether teachers who were engaged in the teaching practice of building—and thus were focused on having the class collaboratively make sense of their peers’ high-leverage mathematical contributions—provided scaffolding that supported the maintenance of high cognitive demand tasks. Attempting to build on high-leverage student thinking seemed to mitigate the teachers’ tendencies to provide inappropriate amounts of scaffolding because they: (1) believed the building practice required them to refrain from showing the students how to solve the task; (2) wanted to elicit student reasoning about their peer’s contribution for the building practice to utilize; and (3) saw the benefits of their students being able to engage in the mathematical thinking themselves. 

Teachers can more productively use board work to scaffold joint sense making. 

To better understand how researchers with existing research projects that were not designed to address concerns for equity can contribute to current needs in mathematics education research, we investigated one such research team’s existing products, including tools designed for use by others, in light of the team’s stated goals to support the learning of all students. We identified several ways that existing research can retroactively be modified in authentic ways that explicitly address concerns for equity and justice. These ways range from incorporating explicit language about the project’s equity intent in the project dissemination to annotating specific connections with equity for each tool in a way that supports using the tool to disrupt inequities.