Abstract
Supporters of US current reform recommendations argue that the classroom instructional practices they advocate are more equitable than traditional instructional practices in giving all students access to significant mathematical ideas. The approach to instructional design outlined in the previous part of this book is broadly compatible with the influential set of reform recommendations proposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2000). The arguments of professional organizations such as NCTM not withstanding, I nonetheless took the view that reform advocates’ claims about equity should be scrutinized carefully. My doubts stemmed from prior work with groups elementary teachers in two different school districts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first of these districts was rural/suburban, whereas the second served an almost exclusively inner-city student population. Erna Yackel, Terry Wood, and I collaborated with teachers in first district for several years. Our overall goal was to help these teachers reorganize their classroom instructional practices in ways consistent with reform recommendations. To this end, we formulated an initial approach to teacher professional development while working with teachers at this site that proved to be reasonably effective (Cobb, Wood, & Yackel, 1990).
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Notes
- 1.
At that time, Hodge was a doctoral student in the mathematics education program at Vanderbilt University. She subsequently completed her dissertation study that focused on issues of equity and diversity in 2001 and is currently a member of the mathematics education faculty at the University of Tennessee.
- 2.
The principal investigators for this project were Paul Cobb, Lynn Liao Hodge, and Carol Lee. Lee was a faculty member at Northwestern University and later became president of the American Educational Research Association. Her work focuses on equity in student learning opportunities in the field of language and literacy.
- 3.
For a notable exception, see Gutiérrez (2002).
- 4.
These design experiments were conducted by Paul Cobb, Kay McClain, Koeno Gravemeijer, Erna Yackel, Clifford Konold, Jose Luis Cortina, Lynn Liao Hodge, Maggie McGatha, Beth Petty, Carla Richards, and Michelle Stephan.
- 5.
- 6.
McClain served as the teacher in both experiments and was assisted in this role by Cobb.
- 7.
Gresalfi accepted a 2-year post doc position at Vanderbilt University in 2004 to work with Cobb on issues of equity and student identity in mathematics classrooms. She is currently a faculty member in the learning sciences program at Indiana University.
- 8.
This formulation of obligations-to-others becoming obligations-to-oneself directly parallels Sfard (2008) argument that learning involves turning discourse-for-others into discourse-for-oneself. The account we have given of the process of identifying is consistent with Sfard’s participationist viewpoint, the basic tenet of which is that “patterned, collective forms of distinctly human forms of doing are developmentally prior to the activities of the individual” (p. 43).
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Cobb, P., Hodge, L.L., Gresalfi, M. (2010). Introduction. In: Sfard, A., Gravemeijer, K., Yackel, E. (eds) A Journey in Mathematics Education Research. Mathematics Education Library, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9729-3_10
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