UC Berkeley

This dissertation was motivated by a commitment to building more just mathematical learning opportunities for children grounded in care and dignity. Creating those opportunities for children begins by cultivating those kinds of opportunities for teachers, specifically marginalized educators. This study seeks to understand what it means to co-construct an identity-centered learning space for prospective teachers of color who seek to develop more just understandings of mathematics. This commitment also stems from an understanding in the need to create spaces of affirmation and support that leverages people’s everyday experiences and repertoires of practice. In teacher education, these spaces of affirmation can be a disruption of the constant marginalization and push out of teachers of color.

For this study, four prospective teachers of color, self-identified Mexicanas and I met over a period of six months and engaged in critical conversations, pláticas. Through pláticas (deep meaningful and personal conversations), the women had opportunities to engage in issues related to mathematics, identity, culture, and justice. Drawing from the methodology of social design-based experiments, we co-designed pláticas with new tools, artifacts, discursive practices, and norms to support learning opportunities towards our commitment to educational justice. The design included our pláticas, interviews, and reflection prompts. Analyses examined the learning environment and its development, the shifts in critical-racial-mathematical literacies and the challenges that arose for the women as they embraced becoming social justice educators.

Findings indicate that throughout the study there was an emerging focus on “practice” as the pláticas progressed and there was an organic emergence of focusing on two classrooms to create change. I conceptualized the co-design process as an iterative, collaborative and in-the moment process that cultivated opportunities for co-constructing new meanings with mathematics and justice. There was also a conceptualization of pláticas as a multidimensional practice. As I sought to understand the shifts in critical, racial and math literacy, analyses revealed that master narratives about mathematics education were invoked, often contradicting, and coming into tension with one another. In fact, they operated as a system, which is complex and not straightforward. As the vignettes allude to, engaging with one master narrative based on a lived experience may potentially reinforce another master narrative. Findings related to the challenges that the women named during pláticas revealed that the women primarily held on to three specific social justice ideals: social justice work is action-driven work, social work engages with political issues, and social justice work transforms lives. Yet, these ideals were often embraced or challenged by the women based on their own experiences as working-class women. This dissertation has pedagogical implications in teacher education, arguing for more identity-centered learning communities to grapple with issues of justice and mathematics. As this dissertation documents, engaging with such issues is complex and difficult. It also has methodological implications as it argues for more humanizing research approaches that center people’s lived experiences.