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ABSTRACT
Following the seminal work of Gloria Ladson-Billings, research on culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) has, in recent years, expanded significantly. Ladson-Billings proposes three elements of CRP: academic achievement, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. Nevertheless, in mathematics education research on CRP, the sociopolitical consciousness element is often under-explored or even absent. This paper began as an investigation of how Ladson-Billings’ three elements could be used to examine prospective and practicing teachers’ (PPTs') perspectives on CRP, prior to their participation in a professional development course on CRP in the mathematics classroom. Thirty-one participants from three separate offerings of the course responded in writing to a set of open questions about CRP (in general and in mathematics). Thematic data analysis pointed to the complexities of categorising the data based primarily on Ladson-Billings’ three elements. In addition, our analysis indicated five components underpinning participants’ responses: challenges; opportunities; fears; resistance; insights. We conclude with a revised conceptualisation of CRP for mathematics teacher education programmes aimed at supporting PPTs’ development of their CRP-related knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Around the same time Ladson-Billings introduced her three elements of CRP, in a different paper (Ladson-Billings Citation1995a) she wrote about six habits of highly effective mathematics teachers for urban/African-American students. We observe that, while in the 1995a paper mathematics is central, her ideas there are linked to critical-race-theory perspectives, and not her ideas on CRP and its three elements. To the best of our knowledge, she does not discuss CRP in relation to mathematics in any of her subsequent work.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kathleen Nolan
Kathleen Nolan is Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Regina, where her teaching and research focus primarily on curriculum studies, mathematics teacher education and critical and culturally responsive pedagogies. Her theoretical interests range from centering her research on the use of Bourdieu’s social field theory to more recent interests in theories based in critical and disruptive pedagogies for mathematics teacher education. Kathleen recently held a Professor 2 position at Oslo Metropolitan University, in Norway (2021-2023), where her collaboration with Xenofontos began.
Constantinos Xenofontos
Constantinos Xenofontos is Professor of Mathematics Education at Oslo Metropolitan University. He had previously worked as a primary school teacher in Cyprus, and as a mathematics teacher educator in Cyprus and Scotland. His research explores how mathematics teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices come to be, as products of the social, cultural, and political environment. Xenofontos is particularly interested in supporting teachers to develop awareness of how mathematics education (research and practice) is framed by sociocultural and sociopolitical factors, and of the challenges many children from minoritized backgrounds face as mathematics learners.