KSTF Young Scholars Research Fellows

In the proposed project, research about the mathematics education of urban students is approached with a focus on newly certified secondary mathematics teachers. To enable all students to have equitable access to success in mathematics, scholars have proposed that instruction should include aspects of the students' lives as contexts for mathematization or relevant urban themes that can be analyzed with a mathematical lens. The use of meaningful real-world contexts as sites for mathematical representation, exploration, discovery, and communication can be viewed as both motivation for and a mechanism of mathematical understanding. A consequential and significant question is, how can mathematics teachers be prepared for such teaching? Indeed, this is the guiding question of the proposed project.

More specifically, this study will seek to answer three important questions: 1) How can mathematics teachers learn to teach mathematics using relevant urban themes? 2) What are the complexities of teacher learning when students come from a variety of cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds all of which may differ from the teacher's own background? 3) How does a structure of a professional community of learners contribute to teacher learning? An important feature of the data collection model is the creation of a Mathematics for Urban Youth Summer Institute, a 35-hour summer institute, to take place in August, 2006. I will plan the content of this Institute, recruit the participants, facilitate the sessions, as well as gather data about the teacher' progress during this program . In the proposed Institute, participants (all newly certified mathematics teachers, mostly at high schools) will work toward developing their own mathematics projects centered on urban themes, focusing on the mathematical ideas, relevant technologies, and potential implementation. Monthly meetings will enable continued support for and study of the teachers' work throughout the school year. These meetings will focus on issues of classroom implementation of projects and will include collaborative analysis of lesson plans, assessments and student work. In addition, a group of three to five focal teachers will participate in classroom teaching experiment activities in 2006-2007, and I will collaborate with these focal teachers by visiting their classrooms, assisting in the planning and implementation of their teaching experiments, and the monitoring or analysis of student outcomes. The entire group will reconvene in a second Mathematics for Urban Youth Summer Institute, in August of 2007, which will be directed at the collaborative analysis of the classroom teaching experiments conducted by the focal group and will inform a second round of classroom experiments in the fall of 2007.

In summary, the proposed study would enable me to closely examine an important intersection of the fields of mathematics education, teacher education, and urban education. This research has the potential to make significant contributions toward the development of theories about 1) the processes of teacher learning about teaching middle and high school mathematics in urban settings, and 2) the effects of a professional community-of-learners model on beginning secondary mathematics teachers.