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This brief research report examines the discursive shifts of a secondary mathematics teacher participating in a collaborative learning community centered on culturally responsive mathematics teaching. We draw on two frameworks to analyze the teacher’s discursive moves. The first framework comes from Lefstein et al., (2020) on generative discourse practices in learning communities. The second framework — FAIR (Louie et al., 2021) — offers noticing practices for deficit versus anti-oppressive mathematics teaching. Through these lenses, we found that the teacher’s initial discourse practices were marked by deficit framing and noticing. The teacher’s discourse practices begin to shift towards a culturally responsive pedagogy in response to a particular artifact that captured student noticing and reframed the teacher’s problem of practice. 

This paper focuses on the trajectories of two mathematics teachers in developing Political Conocimiento through one year of Professional Development (PD) on culturally responsive mathematics teaching. The PD was organized around teacher and student noticing, positionality, community partnerships and action research. The study found that the teachers’ discourse practices shifted from whiteness pedagogies towards politicized notions of schooling, caring, and mathematics learning. The paper discusses the dominant ideologies that teachers reproduced in their discourses around mathematics education and interactions with students. It also illustrates the teachers’ trajectories of Political Conocimiento through the deconstruction of the role that race plays in their positionalities, their classrooms, and school. 

Despite an increasing understanding of how underlying systems of oppression show up and operate in STEM classrooms, little is known about how Black joy and reauthoring can be utilized in supporting Black youths’ navigation of oppressive, anti-Black systems as STEM learners. Partnering with community educators, scholars, and middle and high school teachers collectively called the Black Joy Group, this study conceptualizes the role of joy in Black youth’s STEM identity development. Further, this study examines salient narratives of STEM, which often exclude Black joy and frame Black youths’ STEM participation from deficit perspectives. The Black Joy Group sought to develop a framework for reauthoring to support Black youths’ negotiation of dominant STEM narratives. Reauthoring was investigated from a decolonial perspective, centering embodied learning as a sensemaking strategy. For this participatory model, the Black Joy Group conceptualized Black joy in STEM classrooms through body mapping, drawing, collaging, and by setting intentions to better notice and honor the feelings and sensations of the body. Data sources include interviews and artifacts from Black Joy Group meetings and student reauthoring sessions with Black youth. Data were analyzed thematically to identify instances of STEM reauthoring, classroom practices that best support STEM reauthoring, and abolitionist strategies to support students in expressing joy as an act of reauthoring within a white-dominated space. Results from this study suggest that the constraints of Black joy often stem from whiteness and capitalist pressures that shape how both Black youth and educators of Black youth show up and engage in STEM spaces. Additionally, results suggest that students perceive their belonging in STEM as contentious since they view themselves as STEM people both inside and outside of traditional STEM domains. These findings may support education researchers in continuing to challenge dominant deficit narratives that negatively portray Black youth. Finally, these findings may support educators in providing opportunities for Black youth to exercise their agency to reauthor in STEM classrooms and positively renegotiate their identities in relation to STEM. 

Learning scientists are increasingly shifting the epistemological and axiological basis of their research towards participatory approaches. In these approaches, tensions are viewed as sites for learning, as they reveal lines of power which can be reconfigured towards more just ends. Vignettes from a PAR project with mathematics teachers, leaders of youth-based community organizations, and university scholars illustrate how tensions around practicality and performativity can be taken up or ignored in the research process, and the implications of these moves for new social arrangements. The importance of digging into tensions is underscored. 

Students from less-dominant linguistic backgrounds generally have less opportunity to participate in classroom mathematical discourse compared to their English-dominant peers. An issue raised by mathematics education researchers concerned with issues of equity and opportunities for students is that status quo classroom practices and norms supported by teachers may be less familiar to students from non-dominant linguistic groups, or even detrimental to their classroom participation. Additionally, students who position themselves as doers of mathematics usually come from dominant cultural and linguistic groups (Abreu & Cline, 2002; Hand, 2012), potentially disposing students to perceive classroom mathematics learning through the lens of dominant cultural norms and practices. Thus, students who do not come from dominant linguistic backgrounds might perceive the mathematics classroom differently than their English dominant peers. However, less research has been conducted on how mathematics teachers attend to or notice norms around language and introduce new ones that encourage a multitude of linguistic practices, therefore heightening student participation. Heightening student participation can have implications for students being more likely to identify with mathematics. Additionally, examining students’ participation when using a multitude of linguistic practices or translanguaging is helpful for teachers attending to their own practice to support emerging bilingual students and bilingual students when engaging in mathematical sensemaking.