Abstract
Distributing opportunities to participate in talk-in-interaction during whole-class mathematics discussions is an important equity issue, with multiple studies reporting pervasive inequitable participation patterns in mathematics classrooms. Less attention, however, has been given to the underlying interactional practices that can initiate and support minoritized students’ participation. This article examines how and what kinds of opportunities for participation are interactionally generated for minoritized students in whole-class mathematics discussions in two US high school classrooms. Through the lenses of turn-taking organizations and epistemic dimensions from conversation analysis, this study details the interactional features of turn-taking by three Black students in predominantly White classrooms. The analysis shows the importance of establishing epistemic congruence about the nature of students’ knowledge before inviting them to take up the conversational floor. The findings imply that locally achieved, mutual understanding of what minoritized students know in the moment-by-moment classroom interaction is an important interactional feature for making minoritized students’ brilliance more visible during whole-class discussions.
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The data supporting this study’s findings beyond the excerpts presented in this article are available from the author upon request.
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20 February 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-024-10305-9
Notes
Following Gillborn (2010), I use minoritized people instead of racial minorities to highlight the social and historical process of racial marginalization. Other scholars also use Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to recognize severe systemic racial injustices faced by Black and Indigenous people.
I use Black (rather than African American) to honor the students’ self-identification.
One example from everyday conversation is that participants normatively add an account when they decline an invitation (e.g., I have too much work this weekend). This accounting practice in turn shows that declining an invitation is dispreferred by participants. See Ingram (2020) for a more detailed discussion on the preference organization in the mathematics discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the students and teachers who generously allowed me to study their classroom interaction. This study was supported by my dissertation committee, Drs. Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Kristen Bieda, Alexa Hepburn, Shiv Karunakaran, and David Stroupe. I also thank four anonymous reviewers and the associate editor, Dr. Tamsin Meaney, for their helpful comments.
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Byun, S. Interactional practices of inviting minoritized students to whole-class mathematics discussions. Educ Stud Math 115, 321–350 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-023-10292-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-023-10292-3