College of Education
9 Supporting Elementary Teachers’ Enactment of Equitable Mathematics and Science Instruction
Abigail McWhirter; Lauren Barth-Cohen; and Lynne Zummo
Faculty Mentor: Lauren Barth-Cohen (Educational Psychology, University of Utah)
Background and Theoretical Framework
Promoting equity-oriented teaching practices (EOTP), or teaching that appreciates student diversity and acknowledges their lived experiences, is a necessary undertaking within science and mathematics teacher education. The disciplines of science and mathematics are often assumed to be “objective” and, therefore, disconnected from equity, or tensions related to access for historically underrepresented and underserved populations. However, teacher education that utilizes EOTP has resulted in greater learning outcomes within these fields. There is a growing need to develop these teacher education practices to encourage pre-service teachers’ (PSTs), or teachers in training, to address issues of equity when they appear in PK-12 classrooms. To do so, we utilized a framework known as culturally grounded pedagogy (CGP). CGP refers to teaching practices that 1) leverage students’ multiple strengths and competencies, 2) explicitly value students’ diverse lived experiences and ways of knowing or participating, including language and cultural practices, 3) attend to classroom power and status dynamics to create equitable learning opportunities, and 4) aim to diversify curriculum and challenge dominant perspectives (Aguirre et al., 2013; Banks, 2019; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995; 2014; Paris, 2012). These practices are known as the features of CGP and are often present in classrooms that utilize EOTP.
There are roadblocks to discussing and implementing the features of CGP with PSTs. For instance, merely discussing CGP and equity in the classroom leaves PSTs’ understanding as highly theoretical and difficult to practically carry out. It is beneficial to utilize teaching cases, or hypothetical scenarios, that are developed through collaboration with in-service teachers (ISTs) (Shulman, 1992). This empowers ISTs to reflect upon their experiences of classroom equity and construct cases that present PSTs with realistic and tangible scenarios. PSTs are asked to engage with these cases in the methods courses that outline teaching practices in math and science. This project aimed to analyze the extent to which one such case succeeded in eliciting PST classroom conversation of the features of CGP discussed during its development.
Methods
To design the case, three two-hour long IST workshops were hosted over a period of three weeks. The 6 IST participants were recruited from local school districts and given an introduction to CGP and example cases. They were then asked to collaborate in pairs and design a case.
This case was later implemented into the recorded PST methods class. The 11 PSTs were asked to review the case and draft their own responses before discussing the prompts, firs