By:
Grace A. Chen, Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University
Samantha A. Marshall, Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University
Why are some teachers able to expand students’ access to STEM while others are not? Students from marginalized communities are systematically denied STEM learning opportunities, but some teachers manage to disrupt unjust policies and create more equitable learning environments. Schools are difficult places to make change (Little, 2003), so we wanted to better understand how teachers who were able to make changes in their schools did so.
Theoretical Perspective
We took a sociocultural perspective, seeing learning as dependent on the mediational means available in a setting (Greeno & MMAP, 1997). These mediational means, which are resources like discourses and tools, make particular opportunities in particular contexts at particular moments of time possible (Norris & Jones, 2005; Wertsch, 1994). We also drew on Goodwin’s (1994) concept of professional vision— a socially-situated way of seeing– to understand how teachers make sense of their sociocultural settings. Professional vision has political consequences; what a teacher sees as significant within an oppressive system can change her approaches to the problem.
For the teachers in our study, using a systemic lens to focus their professional vision helped them identify ways to disrupt policies in their schools that they saw as oppressive.
Research Study
This study took place in a research-practice partnership between researchers and a professional development (PD) organization that focused on STEM, pedagogy, and teacher leadership. Participants were secondary mathematics teachers in a large urban district in the western United States, and many of them were regarded as leaders by their colleagues and/or held official leadership positions in their schools.
We collected data in teachers’ schools and in PD settings, emphasizing teachers’ sensemaking and perspectives on these contexts. We took ethnographic fieldnotes and collected artifacts from classroom observations, teachers’ collaborative planning meetings, and PD workshops. We analyzed data using grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and constant comparison (Boeije, 2002), with the aim of understanding how teachers learned to disrupt oppressive systems.
Findings
We share findings from two cases where experienced (between 8-18 years) mathematics teachers effectively challenged oppressive policies, and one case where they did not (for an additional case, see our full paper). All of these teachers aspired to create more equitable learning environments for their students, but they differed in whether their professional vision focused on individual or systemic phenomena as they made sense of ideas like opportunity and justice in their settings. As they thought about what they might be able to accomplish, teachers who took a more systemic view saw their potential actions in different ways than those who took an individual view. In other words, their professional visions shaped what could be accomplished by the distributed agency in the sociocultural settings. These cases show how teachers can disrupt policies that limit students’ access to important STEM learning experiences.
Lauren taught ninth-grade algebra to students who were often underprepared. For years, Lauren saw her classroom instruction as the primary factor in her students’ algebra success, working hard to catch students up during 90-minute class periods every other day. This individualistic view overlooked other important mediational means, such as discourses that blamed students for academic failure and a schedule and student load that limited teacher-student interaction.
Later in Lauren’s career, when she had developed a close relationship with her principal, she proposed adding “lab periods” to focus on remedial content in addition to the algebra periods that prioritized algebra content. Her principal agreed and adjusted the school schedule to enroll students in both an algebra class and “lab” class so that teachers were able to work with them every day, provide an online personalized learning program, and teach half as many students.
Lauren had long held strong ideas about increasing opportunities and justice for her students, but had limited her influence to own instruction and class periods. When her professional vision shifted to a systems view involving the school’s schedule, her relationship with her principal, collaboration with other mathematics teachers, and an improvement grant awarded to the school, she was able to create change in a way she hadn’t before; by focusing her professional vision on systemic change, Lauren marshalled the distributed agency of the setting to better support the mathematics learning of her algebra students.
Isabella felt that the “hodge-podge” and procedural nature of the teacher-created curricula being used in her school’s mathematics department did students a disservice. At first, she focused on developing quality materials for her own students. When she took a more systemic view, however, she realized that reorganizing the entire district’s mathematics course trajectory to pursue an integrated mathematics approach would enable the use of high-quality, professionally-produced curricula. She took a “be discreet” approach with her advocacy where she shared research articles, suggested to the assistant superintendent that they visit schools with integrated mathematics courses, and “very casually” chatted with teachers that she “knew were also skeptical.” After diplomatic engagement with both administrators and teachers, Isabella convinced district leaders to adopt the integrated course sequence and pilot the curricula she suggested.
Among other mediational means, Isabella drew on a number of things: (1) her professional expertise; (2) the trust of her colleagues and district leaders she had earned by teaching at the same school for nearly two decades; (3) her attendance at a conference that enabled her to see integrated mathematics as a potential solution to the injustices in her district; (4) her access to relevant research; (5) the existence of nearby schools that were successfully implementing the integrated approach; and (6) high-quality curricula. Although some of these mediational means had existed for years, they only became opportunities for distributed agency when Isabella took a systemic view.
Kayla and Chloe taught at a high school that became a charter school in order to avoid district oversight. Among the reasons, according to Chloe, was that the school wanted a stricter attendance policy than the district felt was fair: students automatically failed the year after fifteen absences, and teachers were required to lock their classroom doors after the first bell to count tardy students as absent. Kayla and Chloe found the policy draconian but relied on individual teacher subversion or student agency to address it; Chloe secretly let students into her class when she felt they had valid reasons for being late, and Kayla noted that students could appeal their absence records. Their professional vision had an individual lens, overlooking their status as well-respected veteran teachers who have strong relationships with their colleagues and administrators, the material and social resources they could access in and outside of school, or other potential mediational means that they could leverage towards their stated intentions of social justice. As a result, the distributed agency within this system perpetuated patterns that limited, rather than expanded, their students’ opportunities for STEM learning.
Discussion and Implications
Lauren and Isabella’s systemic lenses enabled them to identify mediational means in their settings that could be leveraged to change policies that limited students’ STEM learning. It was not merely their intentions or abilities as teachers, nor solely the available resources, but rather the interaction between their professional visions and the distributed agency in the system that led them to disrupt oppressive policies. By contrast, Kayla and Chloe similarly found a school policy to be limiting but saw themselves as individuals in opposition to a system rather than as participants in the agency distributed across a sociocultural setting, which foreclosed opportunities to act despite their desire for change. Based on this study, we recommend that:
- Teachers
- Ask not only about changes that can be made in your classroom, but about the policies or practices behind injustices.
- Think creatively about how changes can be made at the systemic level. Going through official channels to create change may not always be the most effective pathway.
- Think expansively about with whom and where you may have influence, and when it might be best to discreetly advocate.
- Principals / School Leaders
- Be transparent with your staff about the external expectations you face in your position, and about where you do and don’t have flexibility in making decisions.
- Other Education Stakeholders
- Look beyond just talking to teachers; think about others who might be able to change the policy or system.
- Collect information from multiple perspectives about what is possible and who to talk to.
- Consider a multi-fronted effort: approach multiple people at multiple levels of the system about what they can change.
- Education Researchers
- Examine how and why teachers’ professional vision may be shifted from an individual to a systemic perspective.
- Explore the conditions under which shifting teachers’ professional vision leads to significant change for urban students.
- Teacher Educators
- Teach the history and social contexts of schooling as complements to pedagogical methods.
- Provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to brainstorm multiple and systemic approaches to pedagogical and professional dilemmas.
- Support pre-service teachers in building relationships with mentors, colleagues, administrators, and parents at their school sites.
Conclusion
When teachers have an individualized understanding of the institutional barriers to STEM learning, rather than a systemic view of the possible actors and opportunities within a system, it is difficult to mobilize the mediational means available to disrupt oppressive policies. A systemic view may not be sufficient for this kind of agentic action, but it seems to be an important facet of teachers’ professional vision. Without it, our data suggest, they would not have been able to create the kind of change we saw. These findings point to the important role that teachers can play in removing institutional barriers to urban students’ success in mathematics—in concert with school leaders, education researchers, teacher educators, and other education stakeholders—by seeing affordances within the distributed agency of the sociocultural setting to enact change.
Note about the Authors: Chen and Marshall contributed equally to this post and are listed alphabetically.
Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DGE-1445197 and DRL-1620920. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Grace A. Chen, Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University
Grace A. Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. A former secondary school mathematics teacher, she studies how, why, and what mathematics teachers learn about race, power, and equity, with particular interests in identity, ethics, and affect. Her work on Asian Americans in STEM has been published in Race, Ethnicity, and Education; work with preservice teachers in Cognition and Instruction; work on pedagogical responsibility in Pedagogy, Culture, & Society; and practitioner-facing work in The Best of the Math Teacher Blogs 2015. Chen is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, presented a Twitter Math Camp keynote on the politics of teaching mathematics in 2017, and received the Peabody Faculty Council Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Leadership Award in 2018. Her dissertation focuses on how secondary mathematics teachers make sense of relational work.
Samantha Marshall, Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University
Samantha Marshall is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. Her research seeks to theorize how teachers learn. She takes a sociocultural and sociopolitical perspective, collaborating with teachers and professional developers to both enhance practice and investigate teachers’ learning through a justice lens. She uses ethnographic methods of data collection and engages design-based research. Prior to graduate school, she taught high school mathematics and computer science, and then served as an instructional coach and curriculum designer for non-profits and schools. Samantha is a first-generation college graduate and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her work has appeared in Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, The Mathematics Enthusiast, Journal of Educational Foundations, and Journal of Teacher Action Research.![](https://aaas-arise.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Grace-Chen.jpg")
grace.a.chen@vanderbilt.edu
![](https://aaas-arise.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Samantha-Marshall.png")
samantha.marshall@vanderbilt.edu
