Chapter 4: Teaching a Mathematics Methods Course: Understanding Learning From a Situative Perspective¹

For the last 20 years I have been concerned with how teachers and teacher educators learn. I have been concerned with at least three big questions:

These questions are motivated by the knowledge that schools can be sites of both oppression as well as liberation. Schools play a critical role in creating what Mike Rose (1995) has called possible lives. As many scholars have aptly shown, schools are structured to put in place major barriers to our ability to pursue the goals we want to achieve for ourselves and for our families. My thinking is informed by many scholars in education who have called for us to be much more attentive not just to the quality of subject matter teaching but to the way we position students, whom schools do and do not serve, and the continual ways that those in power shape the life experiences of our students (e.g., Diversity in Mathematics Education, 2007). I am not a critical race scholar or a historian, and I want to be humble about my own understandings of the scholarly conversations on race, privilege, and power. That said, I am reading and listening and trying to expand my own role and responsibility as a teacher educator in helping prospective teachers (PTs) gain some insight into racialized, gendered, and class relations that shape our schools (e.g., Gutiérrez, 2013; Lareau, 2003; Wilkerson, 2010). I teach a course that is situated within a teacher education program that aims to help PTs become social justice educators (e.g., Murrell, 2001; Zeichner, 2012). We try to structure our courses and experiences so that teachers develop allies in schools and in the community to understand the lived experiences of students and families we serve. We want our students to be self-aware and critical of how schools function and how we ideally would like them to function in a more democratic and socially just society. From my perspective, in my course, I want students to be critically self-reflective of how the day-to-day interactions in our mathematics teaching contributes to or undermines the equity goals we have (see also Ramirez & Celedon-Pattichis, 2012; Turner et al., 2012).