‘How do I choose?’: mathematics teachers’ sensemaking about pedagogical responsibility

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ decisions are often undergirded by their sense of pedagogical responsibility: whom and what they feel beholden to. However, research on teacher sensemaking has rarely examined how teachers reason about their pedagogical responsibilities. The study analysed an emotional conversation among urban mathematics teachers about what they teach mathematics for, given the many non-mathematical challenges they and their students face. The familiarity and simplicity of love and life skills narratives deployed to describe what it means to be a good teacher and to do good teaching may be comforting, but limit teachers’ engagement with other authentic forms of pedagogical reasoning about their pedagogical responsibility in complex sociopolitical contexts. The findings reveal the importance of opportunities to explore alternate possibilities ‘for what,’ especially within structured and supportive teacher collaborative groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensemaking
• reasoning
• responsibility
• mathematics
• teaching

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DRL-1620920 and DGE-1445197. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We also thank Susan Jurow and Thomas Philip for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. We use ellipses to signal when we have removed false starts or entire segments of participants’ utterances for the sake of space in this paper and have made every attempt to do so without substantively changing the meaning of the utterance. We also use ellipses to signal where our notes and audiorecording failed to capture teachers’ utterances verbatim.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Graduate Education [1445197]; National Science Foundation Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings [1620920].