UC Berkeley

Advancing participatory equity – cultivating classrooms with fair (not necessarily equal) opportunities to participate – requires a deep understanding of students’ varied learning experiences. Who is invited to participate and in what ways? Who has genuine opportunities to engage with rich mathematics? Who feels they have space to contribute? What, if anything, is holding students back? Every student has meaningful mathematical contributions to make, but not every student is invited and supported to share them. Gender and race shape students’ opportunities to participate, with females and students from minoritized backgrounds often positioned as less capable and less likely to succeed, leading to disparate and stratified opportunities to engage in mathematics. Understanding the complexity of how participatory inequities are constructed and play out through classroom interactions calls for a much broader, multi-faceted inquiry than is currently found in the literature.

This dissertation digs beneath the surface of the commonly used phrase “equitable participation” to craft a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of participatory equity. Three different sets of experiences in a distance learning high school calculus classroom are juxtaposed: (A) the perspectives of the teacher and student teacher, (B) the students’ perspectives, and (C) the researcher’s perspective, informed by lesson observations and video-stimulated interviews, and triangulated with various analytic methods including both qualitative and quantitative equity-focused analyses. In this context, student voice is central. Privileging students’ perspectives provides a deeper sense of why students participated in the ways that they did, which also clarifies the implications of classroom interactions for students’ content and identity development. Key questions include: What did participants notice, and what did they value? How did students’ participatory experiences differ from one another, and how did these differences align with gender and/or race?

Analyses support four primary claims: (1) Participants’ articulation of participation issues (“boys talking too much” or “girls not speaking up”) focused on symptoms of problems as opposed to underlying causes. The underlying causes of unfairly distributed opportunities to participate were structural in nature and carried out through interactions (e.g., having only students with complete and correct homework solutions present to the class). (2) Intertwined gendered and racialized storylines about mathematical competence shaped participants’ experiences with participation in inequitable ways. Storylines affected how barriers to participation functioned, how participatory expectations were assigned, and how teacher-student interactions played out. (3) Participants’ views of participation issues were consistent, and yet were different from the researcher’s view based on semester-long participation metrics. Specifically, participants talked about male students dominating discussions but said little about race, whereas contribution metrics indicated that white dominance superseded male dominance, with male students of color having the fewest opportunities for mathematically meaningful participation. (4) Participants’ views of small-group experiences were consequentially different from each other. In the focal group, three male students experienced the task positively, while the only female student experienced the opposite. The female student’s feelings of not having space to contribute were sensed by the student teacher and supported by interaction analysis but were not noticed by other participants.

By bringing multiple perspectives to light and reflecting on the tensions revealed, this dissertation aimed to help unpack the challenges the field faces in grappling with issues of participatory equity in mathematics classrooms.