This study investigated how eleven secondary mathematics teachers used curriculum resources to plan and enact lessons that support the participation of emergent bilingual (EB) students in mathematical practices in their linguistically diverse classrooms. EB students classified as English Learners often experience mathematics as a set of disconnected procedures. This investigation was rooted in a situated sociocultural theory of learning (Moschkovich, 2002) and a conceptual framework for the teacher-curriculum interaction (Remillard, 2005, 2009). This study was designed to answer the following questions: (1) How do curriculum materials provide supports for engaging emergent bilingual students in mathematical practices? and (2) How do teachers in linguistically diverse classrooms use curriculum materials to plan and enact lessons that support emergent bilingual students’ engagement in mathematical practices?

The study used a contrastive design, examining both the official curriculum and teacher-created materials used by teachers in two districts that adopted different Common Core-aligned curricula. The official curricula provided different types of guidance for teachers to support EB students. The eleven participating teachers, six from School A and five from School B, participated in a lesson planning interview (Grossman, 1990), a classroom observation, and a debriefing interview.

Data analysis included inductive and deductive coding, using a priori codes based upon the CCSSM Standards for Mathematical Practice (NGA & CCSSO, 2010), the English Learners Success Forum’s Guidelines for Improving Math Materials for ELs (ELSF, n.d.), and research on supporting English Learners (Chval, Pinnow, & Thomas, 2015). Some of the main findings of this investigation include the following. (1) The participating teachers held varying interpretations of the eight CCSSM Standards for Mathematical Practice, leading to a wide range of enactments of the same practice standard across classrooms. (2) The participating teachers were not using curriculum materials in their published forms. Teachers cited text difficulty and the difficulty their linguistically diverse students had with reading the textbooks as a rationale for modifying the written curriculum. (3) Despite these variations in enactment, all participating teachers expressed similar care and concern about the success of their students and believed that they were doing exactly what their students need to learn mathematics.

The emerging field of data science has brought attention to how we teach statistics and data science (Bargagliotti et al., 2020; Franklin et al., 2007) and prepare the next generation of statistics and data science teachers (Franklin et al., 2013). To realize the full potential of statistics and data science, researchers have also called for using data to guide conversations about race and racism (Philip et al., 2016, 2017), especially given the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, and public health. In this dissertation, I drew on the Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice (Gutstein, 2006), Quantitative Critical Race Theory (Castillo & Gillborn, 2022; Crawford et al., 2018; Gillborn et al., 2018), and Habits of Mind (Cuoco et al., 1996) frameworks to study the potential of using a social justice-oriented approach to teaching data science for preservice mathematics teachers, highlighting the intersectionality of race and racism with statistics and data science. Data comes from a credit-bearing course taken by 14 students during the Summer 2021 term at a four-year public institution in the US-Mexico borderlands of Southern California. Data included pre- and post-assessments, pre- and post-task-based interviews, and classroom data (e.g., student work, whole-class recordings, field notes). There were four research questions and analyses in this dissertation. First, there was a qualitative description of the features used to design the course centered around Freire’s (1998) notion of critical consciousness and praxis with illustrations of how the design features were enacted. Second, there was a quantitative analysis of pre- and post-assessments that aimed to measure the students’ statistical and data scientific content knowledge. Third, there was a qualitative analysis of pre- and post-task-based interviews that aimed to capture development of students’ critical statistical and data scientific practices. Finally, elements of a focusing phenomenon framework were used to coordinate how aspects of the classroom environment (e.g., design features, tasks, tools, and the teacher) directed students’ attention towards understandings of race and racism in the context of data science.

Inquiry-based mathematics education (IBME) includes features such as: (a) Using tasks with authentic problem contexts, (b) building on students’ everyday resources, (c) relying on small-group and whole-class discussions, and (d) establishing certain norms of participation for the inquiry classroom community (Laursen & Rasmussen, 2019). Prior research on active learning (which includes IBME) suggests inquiry approaches are more effective than lectures in undergraduate mathematics education (Freeman et al., 2014). However, inquiry-based approaches might not yield equal benefits for students from certain marginalized groups (e.g., women in Johnson et al., 2020). One important group to consider is multilingual students whose primary language differs from the language of instruction. In this dissertation, I conducted a multi-case study analysis to explore an overarching question related to equity for multilingual students: What language demands and resources do multilingual students experience in one inquiry-oriented linear algebra (IOLA) course? Grounded in a situated sociocultural theory of learning, I constructed a framework that captures language demands and resources along three interrelated dimensions: lexico-grammatical, situational, and normative. The data collected were classroom observations of one IOLA course taught by an expert instructor, as well as semi-structured interviews with 4 multilingual students from the course. The 4 students spanned a diverse range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Latino) and comfort levels with English. The interview data was analyzed using inductive and deductive coding (Miles et al., 2019). The study's findings show that (a) authentic problem contexts use complex language, especially for multilingual students; (b) “everyday” language resources for students from the dominant community might not function as such for multilingual students; (c) an emphasis on verbal participation can obscure multilingual students’ communication resources; and (d) inquiry classrooms can induce norm tensions about communication for multilingual students when the norms of their communities outside the inquiry classroom are not explicitly considered. This study underscores the opportunity to continue improving IBME to address the language demands induced for multilingual students by incorporating instructional language resources and leveraging the students’ language resources.