Mathematics Curriculum: Home

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In the United States, there is a need for pedagogical tools that help teachers develop essential pedagogical content knowledge and practices to meet the mathematical education needs of a growing culturally and linguistically diverse student population. In this article, we introduce an innovative lesson analysis tool that focuses on integrating mathematical thinking, language, culture, and social justice. We argue that these are essential components to culturally responsive mathematics teaching. Using data collected from a 3-year professional development initiative focused on culturally responsive mathematics teaching including teacher discussions, lesson artefacts, and interviews, the study yields two main results about the tool and its impact on teacher thinking: (1) the tool enabled teachers to systematically analyse and critique mathematics lessons with multiple dimensions including mathematical thinking, language, culture, and social justice; (2) the tool fostered purposeful pedagogical dialogue to improve a mathematics lesson along specific culturally responsive dimensions. The findings illustrate the potential of this tool to engage teachers in strategic lesson planning and purposeful discussions to make mathematics lessons culturally responsive and improve the quality of mathematics teaching in the classroom.

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This article presents findings from an ongoing study focused on deconstructing pedagogical practices of successful mathematics teachers in classrooms with high populations of traditionally underserved students. Using grounded theory, the manuscript reports on general themes and specific practices of culturally responsive mathematics teaching (CRMT) that have been “unearthed” from data collected over several years in three diverse mathematics classrooms. The findings indicate that, regardless of cultural setting, relationships and trust are central to CRMT, while communication patterns and various forms of knowledge mediate these relationships. Ultimately, CRMT provides student access, which is mediated by culture and identity, to complex mathematical ideas. Common concrete practices, such as warm demander pedagogy and reflection, are discussed. These results speak to the complexity of the culturally responsive mathematics classroom and provide suggestions to educators, administrators, and teacher educators who aim to become more culturally responsive.

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In this grounded theory case study, four interconnected, foundational cornerstones of culturally responsive mathematics teaching (CRMT), communication, knowledge, trust/relationships, and constant reflection/revision, were systematically unearthed to develop an initial working theory of CRMT that directly informs classroom practice. These cornerstones were found to interact in unique ways. Results have implications for teachers of mathematics who aim to become more culturally responsive, mathematics teacher educators and supervisors, and school administrators who seek to promote equity in mathematics.

The goal of this chapter is to describe what it might mean for college level mathematics teaching to be culturally responsive and illustrate how culturally responsive collegiate mathematics teaching and learning can look. Our focus is on effective college mathematics instruction for non-mathematics majors in service courses like calculus and liberal arts mathematics. Culturally responsive coursesin the mathematics major are possible, but require a more extensive discussion about the specific nature and purpose of the mathematics major within a department before change is possible.

A major challenge facing "authentic" instruction and assessment is the lack of evidence of their efficacy for students of color, excluding certain high-achieving Asian American groups, and poor students. This article considers the authenticity of performance-based assessments (PBAs), exploring their relationship to pedagogical practices that address ethnic and linguistic diversity. It details the author's efforts to transform English instruction and assessment in ways that draw upon cultural funds of knowledge that African American students bring from their home and community environments. Cognitive and cultural arguments for culturally responsive PBAs and the research implications of their use are presented.

Evaluation’s “ancestors” have formed a strong foundation on which experienced, nascent, and future evaluators can build. An area for growth and cultivation is culturally responsive evaluation. The author describes sociocultural theory (ST),a comprehensive theory explaining how culture influences human development,and its potential for program evaluation. Although ST concretizes culture and provides guidelines for culturally responsive research, it has never been applied to program evaluation.

In an earlier paper, Slee and Keenan demonstrated that it was possible for tertiary education institutions to design culturally responsive assessment procedures that complied with standardised assessment policy. The authors' paper described Growing Our Own, an initiative between Charles Darwin University and Northern Territory Catholic Education, which in 2009 began preparing in situ Indigenous teacher assistants for teacher qualification in very remote schools in the Northern Territory, Australia. The paper demonstrated that the university assessment policy accommodated Indigenous learning, reflecting students' culture, remote learning context, world experience, primary language, family and community values and entry‐level competencies. This article is a systemic response to recommendations arising from a recent external evaluation of Growing Our Own and seeks to demonstrate how the project's approaches meet university assessment rules yet fit within a culturally valid framework.

This article reviews the literature on the various dimensions of culture to discuss the implications for student learning and the development of culturally responsive assessments. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), the author examines the cultural context in which students live as a basis for understanding the effects of contextual influences (such as home, school, and community) and culturally relevant strategies on academic achievement by racial/ethnic groups. Overall, the analysis is useful not only for explaining the role of culture in teaching and learning but also for revealing its importance in the development of culturally responsive assessment instruments. Recommendations for future studies with a within-group and cross-cultural research design are proposed.

Often students' inquiry can be a great teachable moment as well as a "researchable moment." Today, even though much has been written about culturally responsive teaching, the author is often surprised to find that the notion of culturally responsive teaching does not resonate with urban teachers and when it does, they do not know how to teach their specific subjects from that pedagogical stance. The author investigated why teachers are not teaching in a culturally responsive way in their subject areas and what it would mean to teach content areas in culturally responsive ways. The purpose of this article is to report on one aspect of that study--"why" are teachers not engaged in culturally responsive mathematics teaching practices and "what" are culturally responsive mathematics teaching practices.