“We Ask So Much of These Tiny Humans”: Supporting Beginning Teachers to Honor the Dignity of Young People as Mathematical Learners

Abstract

Attending to student sense-making and enacting asset-based approaches to mathematics teaching are becoming a more central focus of mathematics teacher education. Less attention, however, has been given to supporting early career mathematics teachers with the everyday challenges of attempting to bring this vision into the classroom while teaching within deficit-oriented systems of schooling. This article builds on the concept of educational dignity offered by Espinoza and Vossoughi to investigate how to support beginning teachers to counter dominant deficit discourse by honoring the dignity of young people as mathematical sense-makers. We analyze a co-designed teacher learning community in which a group of first-year teachers and a teacher educator used their own experiences with mathematics as a resource to connect with young people in the human experience of learning mathematics. We show how connecting with young people as mathematical learners fostered generative new understandings of mathematical content and deep engagement with children’s dignity as mathematical learners. This research has implications for the design and study of approaches to supporting the disciplinary work of teaching in ways that more fully respect the humanity and potential of young people.

Notes

1 All names used are pseudonyms.

2 An activity from the math methods course in which participants worked on mathematics tasks using a base-5 number system.