CAREER: Supporting Teachers to Leverage Students' Languages in Mathematics

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Decades of research show that quality mathematics teaching builds on the assets that students bring to the classroom. For this reason, there is a pressing need to develop pedagogies that leverage students' languages (an important asset) in mathematics, and, relatedly, to develop methods for supporting teachers in learning such pedagogies. This project partners with a mathematics department at a public middle school to co-design, analyze, and improve teachers' translanguaging pedagogies, that is pedagogies that draw on students' full linguistic repertoires as resources for their learning. This project will investigate how teachers make sense of and enact such pedagogies, how these pedagogies shape all students' mathematical experiences and learning opportunities, and how teachers' learning of these pedagogies can be supported. As a result of this work, teachers, teacher educators, and researchers will be able to better understand how students' languages can be leveraged as resources for mathematical learning, contributing to efforts to provide high-quality mathematics instruction for all students. This project employs a series of three qualitative studies using social design experiment methods to address its primary goals. In the first study, the research team and the teachers will co-design pedagogical resources such as lessons, mathematical tasks, and pedagogical strategies to support translanguaging in middle school mathematics. In the second study, the research team will video-record teachers' classroom instructional practices, focusing investigation on the character of students' learning opportunities and experiences. In the third study, the project team will develop video clubs to support teachers' learning about these pedagogies, using the classroom videos as a key learning resource for teachers. Data will include ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, video-recorded co-design and video club sessions, co-designed pedagogical resources, and video-recorded classroom observations. The primary outcomes will be: (1) a bank of co-designed resources for middle-school mathematics teachers (e.g., lessons, tasks, pedagogical strategies); (2) a bank of videos of instructional practices designed to help guide teachers, teacher educators, and researchers; (3) empirical evidence about the character of students' learning and experiences in mathematics; and (4) empirically-grounded theory of teachers' learning of these pedagogies. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.