Understanding Faith as a Foundation for Grading Practices in Mathematics Teacher Preparation

Amid calls for research elucidating teacher educators’ practices, I explored my journey into alternative grading in mathematics methods courses using collaborative self-study. My prior investigations into grading practices exposed tensions experienced as I adjusted my practice but did not reveal the ways my personal ontology shaped implementation of alternative grading. In this chapter, I share an exploration that revealed the interplay between my way of being in the world as a lifelong United Methodist Christian and the ways this ontology informed my relational constructivist teaching practice, with particular attention to assessment practice. In doing so, I argue that transformation of my grading practices was motivated by a need to act in accordance with my religious beliefs. I employed three techniques in an interwoven fashion to gain insight into my decision-making related to assessment practice changes: writing a narrative, critical friend conversations, and coding of prior publications. This iterative process revealed three tenets of my faith as influential in my pedagogical decision-making: wholeness, community, and grace. Wholeness refers to my desire to align my faith beliefs and lived experiences. Community foregrounds my belief that my faith is lived out in communities shaped by empathy and grace. And grace, freely given to all by God, means that every person is both valuable and worthy of forgiveness for any transgression. Providing insight into one mathematics teacher educator’s practice supports understanding how and why practices vary across individual educators and can inform ways the field takes up best practices in mathematics teacher education.