Abstract
The effects of neoliberal policies have increased inequalities globally and nationally, diminishing democratic accountability. They have also tainted the goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence with regard to teacher preparation. Although various programs of research have examined teacher preparation in terms of diversity and equity, fewer studies have raised questions about institutional constructs of power and privilege: what counts as knowledge?; whose experiences frame curricular and instructional design?; and why and how are systems of inequality perpetuated within and after university-based teacher preparation? In response, this article uses critical pedagogy as a lens through which to view teacher preparation programs as institutions that support neoliberalism by giving unconditional support to a Western episteme that eradicates the knowledge systems of students and teachers of color, including their languages and experiences of the world. The article describes the experiences of four bilingual teachers and teachers of color and their attempts to make mandated mathematics programs more responsive to the needs of their bilingual students. The study follows the four teachers for three years—from their year in teacher preparation to their first two years of classroom teaching—to examine the relation between their experiences as classrooms teachers and their exclusion in the teacher preparation phase. The article then argues that teacher preparation programs should move away from narrow definitions of what counts as knowledge to representing, valuing, and legitimizing teachers and students whose knowledge spans multiple cultural and political frames.
Introduction
Education in the United States of America is under siege. Various stakeholders, ranging from politicians and educational researchers to everyday citizens, have called for an overhaul of the US education system. The perception of a failing system, evidenced by stagnating test scores and persistent poor performance in international comparisons, has led to educational policies aimed at overhauling the current system with a host of entrepreneurial programs promoted by a frame of crisis management (Hill, 2007; Jenlink, 2017).
The discursive frame of crisis is powerful, because it articulates a need for immediate action and has led to increased neoliberal policies not only in the USA but around the world (Dahlstrom and Lemma, 2008; Hibbert et al., 2008; Hill, 2007). Often justified under the guise of justice and equity (e.g., Education for All), neoliberal pressures with regard to educational policies have deprofessionalized teaching (Hill, 2007), transforming educators into technicians and narrowing the teaching profession through shifting classroom foci from knowledge creation to scripted curricula and didactic pedagogy organized around remediation, rote drill, and practice, and the raising of standardized test scores (Ellis, 2008; Lipman, 2012; Rubel, 2017).
This article argues that the effects of neoliberal policies have increased inequities globally and nationally, diminishing democratic accountability and tainting the goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence in k-12 mathematics education and mathematics teacher preparation. Although a growing number of scholars have examined the impact of neoliberal policies on teacher preparation, mathematics education has remained largely out of the conversation (Gutie´rrez, 2013; Turner et al., 2016). Fewer studies have raised the questions asked here about institutional constructs of power and privilege: what counts as knowledge?; whose experiences frame curricular and instructional design?; and why and how are systems of inequality perpetuated within mathematics teaching and university-based teacher preparation programs? (Gutie´rrez, 2013; Lipman, 2012; Rubel, 2017).
Mathematics has been used as an instrument to justify restrictive, test-driven curricula, with mathematics teachers and their preparation blamed as the culprits (Ellis, 2008; Gutie´rrez, 2013, Rubel, 2017). My contention in this article is that to understand the relationship between teacher preparation and mathematics teacher effectiveness, it is necessary to frame this relationship against neoliberalism to reveal the wider policy shifts that have restructured teacher education and its program contents.
This article begins by describing the influence of neoliberal policies on mathematics education and in relation to language minority teachers and students. By sharing findings of a longitudinal study following four teachers for three years, I argue that the current culture of neoliberal accountability is counterintuitive to the goals and values of a democratic society and its education system. The article concludes by envisioning how mathematics teacher education programs might be organized, moving away from narrow definitions of what counts as knowledge, to represent, value, and legitimize teachers and students whose knowledge spans multiple cultural and political frames.
Frames and framing in education
The prevailing discourse in mathematics education has and continues to be framed from a crisis narrative. It can be argued that educational reform in mathematics has been spurred on by some impending crisis purportedly related to threats to US economic and national security (Ellis, 2008; Gutstein, 2008; Lipman, 2012). The crisis metaphor does not manifest itself spontaneously in public discourse but is the product of the prolonged use of particular discursive frames. George Lakoff (2004: 4) describes “framing” in this way: Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics, our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is “a theory of political-economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005: 2). Neoliberalism has had a long history in US education. By the mid-1980s, neoliberal pressures became increasingly visible. The publication of A Nation at Risk (1983) blamed US education for the economic recession, which was purported to be a direct result of students who were poorly prepared to meet the demands of businesses and corporations (Ross and Gibson, 2006). Berliner and Biddle (1995) pointed out the degree to which this report manufactured a sense of crisis to promote the adoption of neoliberal reform in education.
Although education in the USA has historically been a local responsibility, corporate and government leaders pushed for measurable units of accountability through standardized curricula and tests and, ultimately, for the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act 2001, followed by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. These reforms emphasize raising academic achievements to address market demands, thereby creating a tension between teachers’ accountability for standards and students’ needs. Neoliberal policies, such as NCLB and ESSA, have led states to expand their standardized testing of student achievement, particularly in mathematics, and more narrowly define their expectations of what constitutes knowledge. These policies continually overshadow democratic discourse and critical education by coercing teachers to implement restrictive curricula guided by a testing regime designed to validate the proficiency of individual educators, as well as the public education system (Jenlink, 2017; Kumashiro, 2015; Zeichner, 2016). Both NCLB and ESSA associate high standardized test scores with successful teaching; conversely, low test scores equate to underperformance and failure. However, the standardized tests fail to examine and reward robust critical education and learners’ understanding of mathematics, instead privileging a narrow, market-driven frame of knowledge (Berry et al., 2013; Ellis, 2008; Lipman, 2012).
Mathematics education
In this increasingly nationalistic and neoliberal setting, mathematics education has suffered. The performance by US students in international comparative metrics, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), has been poor and is used for political leverage to create a perception of crisis (Ellis, 2008; Gutstein, 2008; Lipman, 2012; Rubel, 2017). Neoliberal policies continue to be promoted using scapegoats (whether it be the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of the US population or the inadequacy of teacher and student preparation) to justify the federal embrace of market-driven systems and the privatization of public education. Meanwhile, the differences in mathematics test scores between the White majority and other ethnic groups tenaciously persist, particularly with regard to the African American, Latinx, and indigenous communities (Lee, 2012; United States Department of Education, 2015).
Why is mathematics education critical? The argument is often made through the achievement lens. Early mathematics skills have been found to be the best predictors of later academic and professional success (Duncan et al., 2007). The highest level of high school mathematics course a student takes determines college acceptance and later participation in STEM-related careers (Lee, 2012). Unexamined is the historical use of standardized assessments as a means to justify the separation of students within and between schools by markers of race, class, and ethnicity (Berry et al., 2013; Ellis, 2008; Lipman, 2012). Ellis (2008: 1338) found that: the dividing practices that emerged within the context of eugenics-era science ensured that opportunities for higher level mathematical learning remained for most students—and disproportionately so for non-White and low-SES students—“objectively” out of reach.
There are alternative ideological frames for mathematics education that move beyond crisis management and the neoliberal rhetoric of economic competitiveness and human capital (Gutiérrez, 2013; Skovsmose, 2005). These alternatives speak to the historical, social, cultural, and political situatedness of mathematics education (Gutiérrez, 2013; Gutstein, 2008; Mukhopadhyay and Roth, 2012; Rubel, 2017). The field of mathematics has been used in the service of warfare and economics; unfortunately, however, school mathematics has ignored the global diversity of circumstances in which people learn and apply numerical concepts (Berry et al., 2013; Lipman, 2012; Mukhopadhyay and Roth, 2012). A critical framing of mathematics education presents this discipline, like all human activity, as inherently social, and emphasizes the fact that all mathematical practices are bound up with lifeways (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Therefore, mathematics education that is democratic and responsive leverages the linguistic and cultural knowledge domains students bring into the classroom (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Mukhopadhyay and Roth, 2012; Roth McDuffie et al., 2014; Turner et al., 2012).
As a viable response to the overemphasis on neoliberal values, there is widespread consensus for the need to diversify teacher workforces to better reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of student populations (Sleeter et al., 2015; Villegas and Irvine, 2010). Currently, there is a demographic divide between an increasingly diverse student population in the United States and a teaching population that remains overwhelming Caucasian, female, and monolingual (Rubel, 2017; Sleeter et al., 2015). A growing body of research demonstrates that bilingual teachers, and those who come from backgrounds similar to their students, may be better able to organize instruction that supports students’ learning of languages and leverages their knowledge domains (e.g., Achinstein and Aguirre, 2008; Yeh, 2017; Sleeter et al., 2015). However, it is important to note that language competencies alone cannot ensure that bilingual teachers will engage in mathematics teaching practices that are effective for language minorities (Achinstein and Aguirre, 2008; Yeh, 2017; Vomvoridi-Ivanovic, 2012). The ability to teach language minorities effectively is not “genetic” in origin or an essential part of any particular cultural or linguistic background but must be “nurtured” through shared socio-cultural and educational experiences (Achinstein and Aguirre, 2008; Yeh, 2017; Sleeter et al., 2015). How individuals are socialized during teacher preparation and how they come to understand the work of teaching mathematics in bilingual settings is critical to their ultimate success or failure with their students.
Neoliberalism and teacher education in the United States
Teacher education in many parts of the world has made major programmatic reforms reflecting ideological shifts in society. The US federal government’s efforts under the Clinton, Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Obama administrations, and the current Trump one have further privatized public education and deprofessionalized the teaching profession (Jenlink, 2017; Weiner, 2017). Fueled by neoliberal logics of accountability, efficiency, and competition, programmatic reforms have encouraged a reductionist view of teaching exemplified by easily quantifiable indicators and reflected a focus on teacher education as a “linear output” transaction (Yeh, 2017; Zeichner, 2016). Current federal teacher preparation regulations require states to annually assess and rate teacher preparation programs. Institutions or programs that are consistently low performing stand in danger of losing state approval, state funding, and federal student financial aid (Kumashiro, 2015).
The heavy reliance on test-based accountability and value-added measures has led to the rearticulation of the missions and goals of teacher education. Prior to the mid-1990s, teacher education assessments focused on what would now be referred to as “inputs” rather than outcomes – institutional commitment, qualification of faculty, content, course structure, fieldwork experiences, and the alignment between professional pedagogical knowledge and standards (Jenlink, 2016; Zeichner and Pena-Sandoval, 2015). By the late 1990s, fierce debates, which were fueled by the crisis narrative, about the effectiveness of teacher education paved the way for the current discourse on the importance of outcomes: productivity expectations and performance-tracking data systems link students’ test scores to teachers and teacher preparation programs (Kumashiro, 2015).
Today, the discourse on outcomes is pervasive and normalized. The US political climate has placed at the forefront an administration that is ripe with neoliberal rhetoric and pungent with marginalizing power abuse. Children’s futures have been handed over to the newly appointed Betsy DeVos, a champion of improving education with market-oriented, value-added assessments that increase consumer choice. DeVos has a history of leading campaigns for the deregulation of the US education system and the dismantling of teacher education programs, pushing out public education and replacing it with market-driven charter schools and school vouchers (Jenlink, 2017; Weiner, 2017). These capitalist interpretations of education have a track record of benefiting the wealthy, as well as drastically harming the growing number of disenfranchised communities within the United States (Harvey, 2005).
Study purpose
Whereas a growing number of research projects and policies seek to “grade” teacher preparation programs by the performance of their graduates, there is a dearth of studies examining the experiences of novice bilingual teachers and teachers of color who have been trained in university-based teacher preparation programs that are structured along neoliberal lines (Jenlink, 2017; Sleeter et al., 2015). This study undertakes such an examination, focusing specifically on the experiences of bilingual teachers and teachers of color. It is especially in this regard that our research, focusing on mathematics education, can make significant contributions to understanding in what ways relations of power and privilege shape educational ideologies and classroom practices, in order to reveal the causes of continuing inequality within teaching and university-based teacher preparation programs. Therefore, the article aims to answer this question: What is the relation between novice bilingual teachers’ experiences in the classroom as teachers of record post-graduation to their learning experiences during teacher preparation?
Method
This study focus on a set of case studies that sprang from a larger mixed methods project involving over 100 novice teachers. At the time of the study, the goal of the larger project was to examine the short- and long-term impact of a teacher training mathematics methods course addressing novice elementary teachers’ mathematics pedagogies (Yeh and Santagata, 2014; Santagata and Yeh, 2016; Santagata et al., 2018). Participants attended a one-year post-baccalaureate elementary teacher preparation program at a public university situated in California. California is notable for a number of distinctions, including being: the nation’s most populous and diverse state; home to millions of immigrants and families living below poverty line; the sixth largest economy in the world; and site of some of the country’s most caustic debates on educational reform regarding curricular standards, bilingual education, high-stakes measurement, testing, and teacher evaluation systems.
Teachers in context
Four teachers who had attended the same teacher preparation program were purposefully selected. For this study, we sought recommendations from faculty for teachers with the experience and potential for developing effective pedagogies with language minorities. All four teachers—Emilia, Kassandra, Peace, and Vanessa—were: identified by faculty; bilingual/multilingual (spoke the first language of their student population); and had experience of teaching in linguistically diverse settings prior to and during the teacher preparation program.
Study methodology
To address the study questions, we drew on qualitative methodologies (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2002). We gathered over 200 hours of ethnographic observations, attending and taking field notes during the two-quarter teacher preparation mathematics methods courses and in the teachers’ own classrooms after graduation from teacher preparation. All classroom teaching sessions and interviews with the teachers were videotaped and transcribed. Teacher preparation program and classroom artifacts (e.g., lesson plans, class assignments, and class-generated work), email exchanges, and informal participant interviews with teachers and other university and school personnel were gathered, and served as secondary data sources.
Data analysis
The analysis process followed Creswell’s (1998) data analysis spiral. During the first phase of analysis, we went through the data gathered after graduation when Emilia, Vanessa, Kassandra, and Peace were teachers of record in their own classrooms—interviews, classroom observations, field notes, and teaching artifacts—to establish a narrative of how each teacher framed responsive mathematics teaching for their students. Analysis consisted of identifying the teaching repertoire privileged in the data sources. The notion of “repertoire” is taken from Bernstein (1996) and refers to the set of symbolic and material resources selected and configured to shape classroom practice. In this case, we examined specifically their curricular and instructional goals and motivations, their methods of instruction, and their interpretations of the students’ mathematics success or struggles and of their own successes and struggles to teach in responsive ways.
During the second stage, we reviewed data pertaining to the four participants’ teacher preparation. Field notes and teaching artifacts (e.g., course syllabuses and class assignments) from the two-quarter mathematics methods course and the teachers’ own stories of the impact of their teacher preparation on their actual teaching were used to provide a narrative of their preparation to teach consistent with diversity and equity. Aligned with the goal of analyzing the data to understand the teachers’ mathematics teaching, data analysis of their teacher preparation also examined the goals, curriculum, and pedagogy of the preparation program. In the third stage, teacher portraits were written. To verify and confirm interpretations of the data, we triangulated the various data sources (i.e., field notes, interview transcripts, videotaped mathematics lessons, and teaching artifacts).
Findings
The findings describe the experiences of four novice bilingual teachers who have been trained in university-based teacher preparation programs structured along neoliberal lines. In what follows, we provide details about the four case study teachers, first in terms of their successes and then with regard to their struggle with critical, equity-oriented teaching practices, and compare their classroom teaching to what they were taught (i.e., what was excluded) during teacher preparation.
Successes with equity-oriented teaching practices
Peace: Peace taught fifth grade at a Title 1 school identified for Program Improvement. The school was at risk of losing funding for not meeting the required adequate yearly progress with regard to their standardized assessments. The majority of the student population was Latinx, with over 40% of the students in her classroom classified as limited English proficient (the official federal classification).
During interviews, Peace expressed the importance of student identity and respect for students’ histories and community for effective learning. Her classroom walls were covered with student photos, personal narratives, and student-written stories about community heroes. One classroom wall was devoted to community building—a space for students to write acknowledgements to their peers for their acts of kindness. To connect classroom and community, Peace created a class web page, posting summaries of events that had taken place during the school day and encouraging students and families to share their out-of-school experiences.
Peace’s mathematics lessons included significant amounts of student talk (25% of lesson time, on average). She supported participation by beginning mathematics lessons with individual think time for students to write down their mathematical thinking in mathematics journals using their language of preference—English or Spanish—before group discussion. Students engaged in mathematics with various tools, notably using the Smartboard to produce visual mathematical representations. For example, in a lesson on comparing equivalent fractions, Peace used the Smartboard to visually represent and compare 7/4 pizzas and 2 ¼ pizzas to highlight the equivalence of the two values. Peace also regularly incorporated physical materials to represent and model mathematical relationships.
Kassandra: Kassandra taught in an English-immersion kindergarten class at Excel Academy, one of the largest public charter school systems in the country. Kassandra and a group of 10 other teachers were hired to start the charter school. The student population consisted only of students of color, with the majority being Latinx (85%) and a smaller number being Black or African American (13%). Kassandra’s students represented the full spectrum of proficiencies in Spanish and English: some spoke only Spanish, some only English, and some were bilingual. Kassandra encouraged students to speak in both Spanish and English and regularly spoke in both languages during instruction.
Kassandra’s classroom displayed less student-generated work than the other three case study teachers. Almost two hours of her instructional time were spent on mathematics with a structured 50-minute morning mathematics block and a 60-minute mathematics workshop in the afternoon. During the morning instruction, the mathematics lessons were typically whole-class lessons organized around individual and group-focused mathematical tasks using visual and kinesthetic tools. The afternoon mathematics block consisted of stations for students to practice basic mathematics facts while Kassandra worked with individuals or with small groups to meet “individual student needs.”
Vanessa: Vanessa taught first grade at Valadez Elementary, a Spanish/English dual-language school, and began teaching when the bilingual education program was in its second year. At the time of hire, bilingual classes were only offered in kindergarten through second grade, and only a small fraction of the school staff were bilingual. Predominantly serving Latinx students (over 85%), half of the student population were native Spanish speakers and the other half native English speakers. Instruction at her grade level was a 90/10 model, with 90% in Spanish and 10% in English.
Vanessa attended closely to the nature of the classroom culture. She and her students wrote grants for justice-oriented projects and invited family and community members to be co-teachers. The class built and extended a school garden, organized a jogging club, and developed a science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) lab. The students engaged in disciplinary literacies across content areas as they developed a permaculture design, row-tilled the ground, developed irrigation, decomposed granite to create a pathway, and created vegetable beds. The mathematical activities, like the garden project, were open ended and drew on children’s interests and every day practices, and her instruction capitalized on children’s ideas, comments, and the other resources present.
Emilia. Emilia taught in a dual-language Spanish/English second grade classroom at Valadez Elementary. Emilia herself was in a dual-language Spanish/English program until the passage of California Proposition 227. The passage of the proposition led to the elimination of bilingual classes and Emilia’s transition to English-only settings in second grade. During interviews, Emilia stressed the importance of students embracing their culture and language. During the observation visits, Emilia regularly had parents in the room assisting and at two of the observation visits they were co-teaching with her.
Emilia created a classroom environment where talk about language was as important as the lesson itself. Lessons in all subjects began with students engaging with the technical terms, introduced with drawings, models, and physical activities, through which the students learned and rehearsed the terms through songs and chants. For example, in a mathematics lesson observed in Emilia’s second year, she introduced the parts of a clock using a totally physical response—the children using their own hands to represent the minute hand and identify the parts of an analog clock. The clock vocabulary lasted for the first 10 minutes, during which students engaged with mathematical terms across representations (e.g., gestural, visual graphical, and oral). After the song, Emilia and the students read from the vocabulary word bank posted on the wall with students echoing back in choral response as Emilia pointed to and read the written mathematical term or phase. This format of frontloading the vocabulary followed by engagement with the mathematical content occurred in the majority of the mathematics lessons observed in her class.
Challenges in relation to equity-oriented teaching practices
The four teachers made efforts to leverage students’ language and culture as instructional resources; however, their efforts to create lessons that honored students’ language, family structures, and traditions, or examined social issues (e.g., community heroes reports or family history projects) often occurred outside the context of mathematics and were limited to the fields of humanities, including English, and social studies. In the few instances when the teachers created contextualized story problems, the context related to general or teacher-initiated settings that were not specifically connected to students’ experiences, and the relationship of the task to the mathematics was superficial. The teachers replaced textbook problems with students’ names or used common experiences—food and sports being the two most common topics—to connect the mathematical tasks on a personal level, but the shared experience often did not link well to the mathematics involved. For example, Peace’s equivalent fraction problem compared the quantity of two medium pizzas; however, the story context would not naturally lend itself to finding equivalent fractions. In this case a person could easily tell the equivalence just by sight without engaging in the calculation. It was common for the teachers to add context to a problem but the context provided did not require the mathematics. Although the mathematics lessons created had the potential to be robust, all the teachers aside from Vanessa struggled to leverage student experiences in ways relevant to the mathematics at hand.
The four case study teachers all created a classroom environment that honored students’ native languages and made both language and mathematics concept development accessible through the use of multimodal representations (e.g., pictures, words, numbers, and gestures). However, the process of learning would still be described as the transmission model (Freire, 1973); the student’s role is passive and the authority for knowledge resides with the teacher. The following is an excerpt from Emilia’s lesson from her second year of teaching: (Emilia points to the three base ten rods on the tens side of the place value chart.) Student: Tres/Three. (A few students respond in unison.)
During interviews, the teachers voiced their fears: not being able to “help their students succeed”; “not being in control of their students” or “their learning process”; and “not performing in comparison to other (teachers).” Peace and Emilia both attempted to provide unscripted spaces for students to make mathematical meaning on their own terms but struggled to leverage students’ ways of knowing under the immense pressure of raising test scores. The testing policy served as their curriculum policy, leading to curricular reductionism and excessive drilling. As Peace stated during her second year: I feel this pressure all the time. I want to give my students time to solve (mathematics problems) their own way and to allow their voice and reasoning to drive my instruction. But I just don’t have time. They’re so far behind.
The culture of performativity for novice teachers
All four teachers were vulnerable in relation to the pressures of accountability and performativity initiatives. Their schools administered district-mandated assessments and, at two sites, monthly inspections of students’ ability to “perform” in line with pre-specified parameters determined by the district’s mandated mathematics curriculum and pacing plans. These performance audits controlled the substance of the teachers’ mathematics curricula, in which the prescriptive accountability requirements served as the benchmark for the teachers’ long-term and daily lesson planning.
Student and teacher performativity were most pronounced in Kassandra’s school. Kassandra taught in one of the largest charter school systems in the country. The school required classrooms to display students’ benchmark assessment scores on “data walls”—classroom bulletin boards showcasing students’ tests scores and visible to students, parents, and staff. The data wall was part of the school’s overall mission to engage in what Kassandra had described as “work that was visible and measurable” so that it can be exteriorized and translated into results for measurement and comparison. This highly competitive system was coupled with the school’s teacher evaluation system linked to teacher merit pay. Kassandra’s evaluation was determined based on “student growth” as measured by standardized state tests, as well as her ability to “perform” in line with pre-specified parameters for teaching. Kassandra's classroom practice was the most constricted and test-oriented of the four case study teachers. As her students’ exam grades continued to improve in accordance with a “teaching to the test” ideology, Kassandra’s critical spirit to challenge the test-driven culture concurrently faded.
In comparison, Vanessa was the exception. Vanessa engaged in culturally bound pedagogies, using common school- and community-based experiences as mathematical tasks (e.g., fair sharing of classroom materials, the development of a school garden, and local school field trips) to leverage students’ daily applications of mathematics. Vanessa taught in a school that was just starting with a two-way dual-language program, and she, as a bilingual faculty member, was in a minority among the mostly monolingual, usually English-speaking staff. Despite her success in the classroom, Vanessa often discussed feeling overwhelmed, isolated, and frustrated with the structural constraints that challenged her work. At the end of her fourth year, Vanessa left the classroom.
The culture of performativity in teacher education
It is important to trace the four teachers’ classroom teaching back to their teacher preparation to reveal the contested dynamics of power and privilege that shaped their educational ideologies and classroom practices. Analysis of teacher preparation program materials showed that the course articulated a discourse of democratic accountability. The program mission focused on preparing teachers in four areas: (a) developing an inquiring stance; (b) appreciating the unique resources students bring to the classroom; (c) supporting learners of a second language; and (d) collaborating with faculty, peers, and mentors to continually improve practice. The teachers took sub-courses on multicultural education, language acquisition, and mathematics methods.
The multicultural education sub-course provided readings and assignments on the diverse cultural possibilities that might relate to student learning, and teacher candidates were asked to create curricula and assessments responsive to students’ cultures and communities. However, these assignments were not specific to mathematics, a field that has been identified as being more difficult to make culturally relevant than humanities fields such as English and history (Yeh, 2017; Vomvoridi-Ivanovic, 2012). Also absent was the situating of curriculum and assessments within an economic and political context, which has led to most teaching decisions residing outside of the classroom: word-for-word scripted curricula and lessons dictated by international and national testing regimes. In not situating issues of education within the framework of neoliberalism, neither did the course give the teacher candidates opportunities to consider how to push back or fight against the negative consequences of these policies.
Preparation for teaching language was limited to one sub-course on “English language development,” in which teacher candidates learned about specifically designed academic instruction for English (SDAIE) strategies. These language methodologies explicitly targeted vocabulary development through teachers’ active modeling with the use of visuals, demonstrations, and hands-on learning. The four case study teachers’ emphasis on key vocabulary and a multisensory learning experience is representative. The context of teaching language only explored theories and teaching practices for English language acquisition; the underlying theory, the practical applications of bilingual education, and a critique of White supremacy or English hegemony in US schools were not included in the program materials reviewed.
The preparation program offered a two-semester mathematics methods course on developing teaching methods aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The methods course fostered a “learn by doing” approach: teacher candidates wrestled with mathematical concepts, explored physical tools, and practiced explaining their reasoning to colleagues. This hands-on approach to mathematics was seen in the four teachers’ pedagogies; they regularly used physical and visual models to develop mathematical concepts. However, there was an underlying assumption that these teaching practices were the “right” teaching methods and strategies for all students and all teachers. The course assignments and readings did not touch upon the role of language, culture, or students’ out-of-school mathematical practices. This one-size-fits-all model also ignores the neoliberal racial narratives (e.g., standardized mathematics instruction, normalized assessment measures) that continue to marginalize students and teachers of linguistic and cultural diversity (Ellis, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2013; Zeichner, 2016).
When asked during the last interview to reflect upon their teacher preparation, all four teachers described the overwhelming Whiteness and irrelevance of the teacher preparation available to them. As Vanessa described in her interview: It’s hard. All the materials I have in the classroom (now) are translations of English textbooks to Spanish. The Spanish is off and the stories don’t connect to my kids. It (was) the same in the program. Everything was about preparing us to work with students in English. How (a)bout for those of us that are not White and teach in bilingual settings?
The TPA requires teacher candidates to appropriately support the language and academic learning of all students, including those with special needs and language learners; however, any discussion of culturally responsive pedagogies was limited and framed within the discourse of “helperism” (Zeichner, 2016). The underlying emphasis was to “help” students by making the curriculum comprehensible, but the role of the helper and, therefore, the authority of power and knowledge, remained in the hands of the teacher. This was seen in the four teachers’ classroom practices, in which they regularly engaged in pedagogies to support student access to the content with hands-on tools but struggled to engage in problem-posing pedagogy—education in which students themselves are the agents of knowledge.
Conclusion and implications for mathematics teacher preparation
This study followed four teachers for three years—from their year in teacher preparation to their first two years of classroom teaching—to examine the relationship between their classroom experiences and their teacher preparation. Analysis of the goals, curriculum, and pedagogy in the four teachers’ classrooms and their teacher preparation program revealed similar findings. The teachers’ mathematics curriculum resembled the curriculum of their teacher preparation—fast paced, with predetermined content and materials, and test driven. The emphasis on accountability measures in the teachers’ schools and their teacher education program constrained teaching to restrictive curricula that continue to serve the economic and political interests of the dominant ideology at the expense of students and teachers of linguistic and cultural diversity. However, this is not the end goal of education. As John Dewey said, if the purpose of education is to learn how to live to one’s full potential and to use such skills for greater good in society, then the proposed regulations need to expand and enrich rather than narrow and limit how the nation thinks about and advances the promises and purposes of teaching and teacher education. (Kumashiro, 2015: 9)
Reframing of mathematics teacher preparation begins by recognizing that mathematics education is political. Given its privileged position, mathematics education plays a key role in generating a discourse that considers students as human capital. Students are seen as the future producers and consumers of the economy, in which mathematics expertise is regarded as essential for economic growth and for the nation to compete effectively at a global level (Ellis, 2008; Gutstein, 2008; Lipman, 2012). All the while, the blame for poor performance falls on teachers and teacher education institutions and is used as leverage to deprofessionalize and relocate teaching decisions to outside of the classroom (Sleeter, 2008; Weiner, 2017; Zeichner and Pena-Sandoval, 2015).
Mathematics teacher educators, therefore, must prepare pre-service teachers to face the challenging conditions in which they will teach. These challenges are not isolated at the micro-level (e.g., mathematics content, students, and classrooms). Teacher candidates must understand the role of mathematics education within a national and global (i.e., macro) context and the ways in which the current political and economic climate creates challenges for their efforts to enact humanizing, culturally responsive mathematics pedagogies.
The position taken in this article, and by an emerging group of mathematics teacher educators, researchers, and activists (e.g., Ellis, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2013, Rubel, 2017; White et al., 2016), argues that teacher education programs must attend to the political, historical, cultural, and social situatedness of mathematics education. Mathematics has been used as a weapon to advance capitalist interests (Gutstein, 2008; Lipman, 2012; Rubel, 2017); however, there are alternative forms of mathematical knowledge and practices than the narrow definition currently privileged. Mathematics, like all human activity, is richly diverse (Gutiérrez, 2013; Mukhopadhyay and Roth, 2012; Skovsmose, 2005).
Bilingual teachers and teachers of color are important for all students; teacher education must view them as knowledge producers with the potential to enrich the learning experiences of teachers and students alike. Gloria Anzaldu´a (1987) highlights the borderland spaces that teachers of color inhabit such that their identities are produced in multiple and often contradictory spaces of dominance and non-dominance. In particular, their worldviews include homegrown ways of knowing as well as dominant epistemes (Anzaldu´a, 1987; Sleeter et al., 2015); however, these diverse knowledge domains must be cultivated to support teachers’ capacities to use their cultural knowledge for pedagogical purposes in mathematics (Achinstein and Aguirre, 2008; Yeh, 2017; Vomvoridi-Ivanovic, 2012).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.