Equitable Teaching Reflection: How do we make knowing our students central to our daily teaching? (EQ5)

Weekly Questions: How do we make our students’ cultural backgrounds central to our daily teaching? Who are our students? How do we make our students’ humanity central to our daily teaching?

With the weird circumstances of the semester, I never actually responded to this essential question in blog form! For reference, I have included the weekly questions above in place of the links to my previous blog posts. 

When it comes to making our students central to our teaching, the first and easiest way to do so is to simply pay attention to their interests! Making assignments like we saw under essential question 1 (originally mentioned here) in the Aguirre, Mayfield-Ingram, and Martin (2013) reading is a great way to work for anti-racism and social justice in the classroom. Mr. C's curriculum took his students' cultural backgrounds and their current experiences and introduced math to the situation to help them work with/against the system. This is an awesome way to integrate your students' lives into your teaching, but it's not the only way. Especially as a brand new teacher and a teacher not specifically trained in teaching for social justice, this is going to be a bit far out of my wheelhouse for everyday lessons. The same went for the reading from Rubel and Lim (2018). While this curriculum is a bit more attainable, perhaps, than that in the Aguirre, I know that it is something that this teacher accomplished with an entire team of curricular design professionals backing them up (I first mention this reading here). Thus, I need to find smaller ways to bring my students into my day-to-day teaching. Luckily, simply attending to student interests and showing how math applies and is important to those interests is doing that work. Valuing the students, who they are, and what they are interested in brings them into daily teaching. If my students are really into TikTok, I can write questions about the algorithm or about the ratios between likes and comments. If they're really into cooking and baking, I can write assignments about family recipes, bringing even more of their cultural backgrounds into the school building. Even on the most basic level, I can use their names and favorite things in my questions. And at the end of the day (quite literally), I can attend their extracurriculars to continue to show them how much I support and believe in them. 

In the Williams reading Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics (2020), she says "as you read through the incredible stories of the women profiled in these pages, the one thread they all have in common is that at some point on their journeys, someone believed in them; someone made them think the impossible was perhaps not so impossible." That's something I will always bring with me into the classroom, even more so because it happened to me. When I think about why I want to teach, I always think about Mrs. Crafton. She was my 5th-grade math teacher, and one day when we were working in pairs and the class had an odd number of students, she said to me that she knew I wanted to teach someday, so she gave me the teacher's manual and sent me around the room to offer help when students got stuck and check their answers. Then I think of Mrs. Westjohn, my Algebra II teacher, who told me I was going to be a great teacher when I was asking her some questions about tutoring. It's these teachers, the ones that believed in me, that I still think about. 

These questions also made me think of another reading, one from Classroom Ecology by Milner, Cunningham, Delale-O′Connor, and Kestenberg (2018), where students were acting out at their new school because they could no longer be on a soccer team. When the teacher discovered that students were writing on the desks in the classroom, complaining about their new school, she called the students together to discuss the matter. Her students were comfortable enough to come clean and tell her they were the ones who did it. Instead of invalidating their feelings because they expressed them in a way she didn't appreciate, the teacher acknowledged their hurt and helped them find a new way to tackle the situation. The students became excited to push for the establishment of a soccer team, and the teacher had a new interest of her students' that she could incorporate into the math lessons, perhaps even using the mathematics to convince the administration of the need for a soccer team!

Overall, knowing my students and making them central to my teaching doesn't have to be that complicated. I'll encourage then, whatever their interests are, whatever their successes are, and bring those to the forefront. I will acknowledge their competencies, highlight them, take notes on them (just like Hand, Kirtley, and Matassa (2015) suggested, where they encourage creating a chart to note student competencies and strengths), and create spaces for those strengths to shine through. And I'll even just ask them who they are! People tend to like talking about themselves, so I see no reason to leave show and tell for the young kids, at least (especially?) in this online space. I'll encourage sharing pets, siblings, trophies, stuffed animals, and other fun things so we can all learn about each other and connect over shared interests. I unsurprisingly was inspired around show and tell by a TikTok I recently saw, but I cannot seem to find it. I'll update this post with credit when I do discover it (and I just might start another post to save all of the influential TikToks I find)!