Commentary 3: Valorization of Knowledge as a Component of Understanding and Building Upon Students’ Thinking: A Commentary on Civil’s Case

As a mathematics educator in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University, I generally teach mathematics methods courses and mathematics education graduate courses. I also developed and teach a course on children’s mathematical thinking, a laboratory for students enrolled in their first mathematics course for prospective elementary school teachers (PSTs). In the presented case, a student in a mathematics class for PSTs, after reading an article about notations and algorithms taught in Latin American countries and differing from those taught in U.S. schools, said, “This is nice, but they need to learn to do things the U.S. way.” The dilemma for Civil is how to respond to this comment, which she interpreted as a failure of her student to “value others’ ways of doing mathematics, particularly when the ‘others’ come from nondominant communities.”