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Mathematics Pedagogical Teaching Philosophy

Desiree Harvey

EDUC 7520 Mathematics and Technology: Teaching and Learning

February 20, 2018

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As an elementary school teacher, I have the power of flexibility in my class schedule and

in academic components of the day because I am the person responsible for teaching everything.

Therefore, when I think of ways to ensure that conversations, lessons, and the class culture are

just I automatically come up with ideas to implement during opening and closing meeting,

reading lessons, or the social studies component of the day. For some reason, these times feel the

most natural to open up these dialogues with my students. However, I realize that it is even more

crucial to make sure that your instruction is just in relation to other subjects such as mathematics

and the sciences. These are fields in which students of color have been historically marginalized

and therefore it is important to me to create an environment that empowers students and shows

them a counter narrative that presents them as equally capable and intelligent.

My stance on justice as it pertains to math instruction is a mixture of the sociocultural and

sociopolitical views. The two stances are similar in that they both use math as a tool to disrupt

structures that exist and create space for marginalized identities. The sociocultural perspective

values the incorporation of historical contexts into mathematics and realizes that mathematics

privileges a certain way of being over others. The sociopolitical perspective uses math to bring

attention to social problems and uses math as a tool to solve them. Again, the students can

recognize themselves as change makers and realize the power of what they are learning when

utilized by marginalized communities. The educator with this stance would leverage different

cultural backgrounds in order to make math instruction reflective of the students they are

teaching. In addition, they would be strategic in incorporating the real-world into their

curriculum. This aligns with the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy and has the same benefits

within math instruction as other academic components. If students are able to see and recognize

themselves and have their identities validated while engaging in problem solving they will be
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more engaged and bought into the transformative nature of the material they are learning. They

will understand how sometimes abstract math concepts can affect their reality in their

neighborhoods and will want to use it as a tool to change the systems in place. Recently the

movie Black Panther featured a young woman of color who used mathematics in order to keep

her nation and their hero safe with the latest innovations. This is an example of a person of color

who is utilizing these perspectives in order to harness a field that they are normally excluded

from and use to advance their community. Young students of color who see this film are able to

see themselves in this character and will aspire to be regarded as an intelligent person who was

essential to their community surviving and thriving.

My perspective on teaching mathematics is a mixture of cognitivism and the social-

cultural learning theory. This aligns directly with my stance in believing that students will

internalize concepts by making it meaningful to them and by building on their previous

knowledge. However, I also align with the idea that collaborative learning groups drive learning

in the classroom for students. Our school rejects the “I do, we do, you do” form of teaching and

therefore even though I grew up learning like this I was assimilated into a culture where this was

not what effective teaching looked like. I am not opposed to this because looking back I can

think of many instances where I was sitting in the AP math classroom and completing steps in

order to solve a problem but had no real understanding of what the concepts meant and why I

was completing the steps to solve. It was not until I took college calculus that I began to

understand what it meant to take the derivative of a function.

In my math practice, I most identify with the bag of tools concept but would like to grow

towards adopting more of a dynamic problem driven view. During my educational career, I was

taught a lot of strategies that I need to learn when and where to apply in order to solve math
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problems most efficiently. In some aspects, I see this coming through in the way that students are

currently taught math at my school. We focus a lot on facts and skills that students will apply to

tricky problem that they come across. However, I also see the strengths in dynamic problem

solving and would like that to drive my instruction more than the bag of tools concept. At

Brooke Charter, we try to push this type of conceptualization of math during a component of the

day called logic stories. During logic stories the students are presented with a challenging word

problem that is not directly connected to what they are learning in math and must try to problem

solve. The practice of this skill is supposed to then transfer over to their problem solving on

assessments and in math class but doesn’t always because of a disconnect between when they

believe they can apply the problem-solving strategies. By working towards a dynamic problem

solving view this divide will hopefully be lessened.