Chapter 9: Promoting Equitable Teaching in Mathematics Teacher Education

Ensuring equity for all learners in mathematics education has been on the international agenda for many decades with little evidence that it is being achieved. Moving education way beyond its traditional function of sorting remains challenging. Reliable and trustworthy evidence of what is important and makes a difference is important. However, access to such evidence is not sufficient. Evidence about the negative effects related to streaming and ability grouping (Schleicher, 2014), segregation by race, and socioeconomic factors and its by-product of having access to only lower qualified teachers in these schools, as well as the labelling and low expectations of the students maintained through deficit theorizing by teachers of the students and their families within these communities (Kitchen & Berk, 2016) has accumulated over decades. There is evidence of good intentions on the part of policy makers, researchers, teacher educators, and educators to address the huge disparities in access to, and achievement in mathematics which exists between the different groups of students (OECD, 2016), but good intentions are insufficient, change through transformative action is urgently needed (Alton-Lee, 2015, 2017). Moreover, Alton-Lee (2017) argues the need for careful monitoring of implemented actions to ensure that unintended outcomes do not emerge which continue to support what Martin and Larnell (2013, p. 376) describe as “failure focused” story lines; narratives which place blame for lack of achievement back on the learner rather than on the essential lack of understanding and incompatibility between teacher and student backgrounds, along with the institutionalized practices in the school setting which position these learners to fail. Our goal in this chapter is to present research-based evidence of transformative actions that draw on strength-based approaches. We begin by presenting our view on what we mean by equity. We then draw on Rubel’s (2017) four equity focused instructional practices as these capture the current developments in the topic of equity in mathematics teacher education. We will then use vignettes from our own research with teachers to illustrate some of these practices and offer suggestions for how equity can be promoted in teacher education.