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In postsecondary education, Calculus has been historically recognized as a “gateway course” for students to pursuit STEM fields. Responding to this issue, researchers at Montclair State University designed a model of complementary instruction to engage Calculus I students in collaborative problem solving on groupworthy tasks. This multiple-case study seeks to address the question, “How do undergraduate students experience their calculus learning in the parallel spaces of coursework and inquiry-oriented complementary instruction?” The findings of Neil’s case study are presented here and include characterizations of the different forms of agentive participation afforded to students in the two spaces, as well as their complementary nature relative to learning calculus with understanding. Implications for dismantling the persistent barriers imposed by calculus on access to postsecondary STEM fields are also discussed. 

Calculus has long been known as a “gateway course” to STEM fields in postsecondary education. To address this issue, researchers in the Math Department at Mountain State University (pseudonym) designed a model of complementary instruction that features peer-facilitated workshops where Calculus I students work in groups on inquiry-oriented, groupworthy tasks. The purpose of this multiple-case study is to seek answers to the question, "How do undergraduate Calculus I students experience and navigate their learning of calculus in the parallel spaces of coursework and inquiry-oriented complementary instruction?" The findings of one case study are presented here and include characterizations of the different forms of agentive participation afforded to students in each of the two spaces, as well as their complementary nature relative to learning calculus with understanding. Implications for dismantling the persistent barriers imposed by calculus on access to postsecondary STEM fields are also discussed. 

Calculus has long been known for its gatekeeping role in postsecondary students' pursuit of STEM careers. In addressing this pressing issue, researchers at Montclair State University developed a model of peer-led complementary instruction to engage Calculus I students in small-group, collaborative problem solving on inquiry-oriented, groupworthy tasks. This work comes from a multiple-case study that sought to address the question, “How do undergraduate students experience and navigate their calculus learning in the parallel spaces of coursework and inquiry-oriented complementary instruction?” The analytic representations that were constructed to represent the findings of that study are presented here. Those findings include characterizations of the different forms of Calculus I students’ agentive participation and the figured worlds of class and complementary instruction. The analytic representations depict those findings in the form of word clouds and Venn diagrams. The analytical representations of “Victor’s” participation are presented and discussed here, and an argument is made for their particular representational power and efficiency. As such, this work seeks to make a methodological contribution to education research that seeks to characterize the nature of participation by the actors in figured worlds.