CRITICAL OBSERVATION #1 Teachers as Identity Workers It was early in the semester, but I knew it would be important for students

to realize early on that their role in our class would be much different. I wrote two words up on the board Consecutive Sums. Who knows what a sum is? I asked. Its the answer you get when you add two things together someone chimed in. Just two things? I replied. .well, nook.its the answer you get when you add any number of things together they corrected. Ok, who knows what consecutive means? Its when things come one right after one another. Can you give us an example? Uh.surethe numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are consecutive. Ok. What else is consecutive? A, B, C, D. Ok. Good. Well, today we are going to do something very different than what you are probably used to doing in math. I want you to just explore, experiment, and play with sums of consecutive numbers. For instance, you might start out by seeing what happens when you add only two consecutive numbers... I wrote on the board: 1+2 = 3 5+6 = 11 ! 57!

.or you might try three consecutive numbers 1+2+3 2+3+4 3+4+5 or four, or five, or whatever. As you experiment, keep track of all of your thoughts, questions, conjectures, and findings. Feel free to follow your curiosity. With that, I set them off on an exploration to play and see what they came up with. We werent too far into the activity when I came around to Bens desk. He looked up at me and pointed down to his paper. He had only one thing written. An = A1 + d (n - 1) What is that? I asked. We are doing sequences. I learned this at my old school. I know we use it for sequences he said. How do you think that might help you with our activity? Well.Im not sure.but I know this formula. Is this what you are trying to get us to do? he asked. Not necessarily. I think it would be really cool if we came up with something new on our own. Why dont you just play around with things for a bit and see if you notice anything interesting. Ill come back in five minutes and see what you are up to. ! 58!

I walked around for a bit, taking notice of interesting things that students were doing that might be good to share with the class. As promised, I came back to Ben about five minutes later. Well, Ben, how is the experimenting going? Its not. I dont know what you want me to do, he said defensively, still with just the lone formula on his page. I bet if you could let go of that formula for a bit and trust yourself to experiment, you might create something really interesting. Ben struggled through the rest of that class period; confused by the new environment he was in and unsure about what to do when nobody told him what to think. MAKING CONNECTIONS The incident with Ben that day has stuck with me since that critical moment. It pained me to see someone who was so used to being told what to do, so used to being told how to think, that he no longer trusted his own ability to figure things out. I truly dont think people are born this way. We are curious creatures. The banking model of education places students in a position of submission (Friere, 1970). Through that, they form not only their definition of what mathematics is but also their definition of teacher, student, and self.

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The Banking Model Paulo Friere describes the prevailing view of education as an oppressive banking model. Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are (1970, p. 72). Although Friere clearly indicates his stance, the general view of education is still predominant in todays society. Even recent educational documentaries, such as Waiting for Superman, feature cartoon images of teachers going around the room pouring knowledge into the heads of students. While perhaps good intentioned, this type of student-teacher interaction comes with what I believe to be a serious set of risks. Early on, children develop beliefs about mathematics and the role of both teacher and student in learning mathematics as a result of their classroom experiences (Schoenfeld, 1994). This was clear to me early on in my work with my 10th Grade Mathematics students. The first week of school, students reported the following beliefs about mathematics (Figures 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3): ! 60!

FIGURE 1.1 Survey Results (Beginning of Year)

FIGURE 1.2 Survey Results (Beginning of Year)

FIGURE 1.3 Survey Results (Beginning of Year)

It is clear from their results that students have come to know mathematics as a fixed body of rules and formulas, things to be memorized and practiced. They view it as external to themselves, ! 61!

not something that arises out of their own thinking and doing. It became easier to understand Bens behavior with Consecutive Sums that day when I realized that 80% of my students come in to my class believing that they need to learn steps for a math problem before they can even attempt it on their own. I received further evidence when I asked students to describe what they view as the role of the teacher and the role of the student in math class. Roughly 79% reported the teacher as the authority figure (status and epistemic) and the student as the recipient. Below are some of the ways in which they articulated their beliefs (Figure 1.4a and 1.4b): FIGURE 1.4a Role of Teacher grade the work impart knowledge on the students teach the material share their knowledge lecture explain teach clearly help solve problems and do them over and over again pass on knowledge teach math concepts so they are simple and easy to understand show examples of a problem teach students how to do the assigned work give and deliver information

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FIGURE 1.4b Role of Student listen to the teacher take all the knowledge the teachers have to offer learn from the teacher take notes do worksheets pay attention study diligently be quiet absorb the knowledge absorb information learns what the teacher teaches There is an unmistakable air of behaviorism in how students view the role of teacher and student and, consequently, how they view learning. They believe knowledge is transmitted or absorbed. Of particular importance to me is the fact that students believe it is the job of the teacher to make concepts easy to understand. This belief is problematic. It directly affects their willingness to persist in the face of uncertainty and students, in the words of Eleanor Duckworth, fail to honor confusion (Duckworth, 1996). From the constructivist perspective, confusion, cognitive conflict, and the individuals ability/willingness to make mental adaptations are all essential elements of learning. If students shut down in the face of confusion, it presents a significant roadblock. The Threat to Agency Bens behavior with Consecutive Sums is a clear example of how a students experience in the mathematics classroom can have an ! 63!

impact far beyond just the learning of mathematics. This type of behavior is concerning to me on a number of different levels. At the most basic level, Ben has developed a particular frame of mind in relation to his definition of mathematics. His behavior and words indicate that he views mathematics as something to be memorized and used, as something external to his own thinking. To him, mathematics is a finished set of rules as opposed to an active process. His classroom experiences have failed to teach him that mathematics is something that should arise out of our own ways of thinking, that it is something that should make sense, and that each individual has the epistemological authority to judge the validity of their own mathematics (Schoenfeld, 1994). In addition to, and as a result of, his developing definition of mathematics, Ben has also started to develop a mathematical identity. He believes his place is to follow direction and mimic the thinking of others who are perceived to know more than him (teacher or, perhaps, other students). I worry about this because it causes Ben to see his thinking and mathematical thinking as separate entities. He does not see himself in the mathematics of the classroom and does not recognize his own thinking as mathematical. This has led many people to believe that there are math people and non-math people. Unfortunately, from an early ! 64!

age being good at math has come to mean surrendering your own ideas for blind faith in the ways of the discipline of mathematics. At an even larger level, I worry that Bens classroom experiences with mathematics are affecting his overall sense of self. His exposure to routines, mimicry, and formulaic problem solving has taken away the creative individuality involved with thinking and being in the world. There is a certain reliance that has been developed that, I believe, affects his agency, or willingness to act, in the face of novel and uncertain problems. This has clearly been demonstrated in his figured world of mathematics (Holland, et al, 1998) and I wonder about the degree to which it has also transferred to other parts of his life. IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING If the current state of things is causing these problems, then how might we interact with students and mathematics differently? I suggest we start by asking ourselves the question, what is mathematics? Such a seemingly simple question seems, to me at least, to have a rather elusive answer. While I cant say for certain that I know what mathematics is, I can offer an alternative view to the one that is prominent (although often unspoken) in school mathematics, one that might create a more just space for students and teachers to engage in mathematical activity together. I will also attempt to provide examples of how this vision of mathematics could out in our classrooms. ! 65!

What is Mathematics? There seems to be a prevailing ideology in society that mathematics is a set of a priori truths; that mathematics precedes and is independent of experience. This is often hinted at in the ongoing debate about whether mathematics was discovered or invented. Many people find refuge in the fact that mathematics describes reality or through its seeming infallibility with arguments such as two plus two will always equal four. I would counter that by suggesting that this absolutist view fails to acknowledge both the human elements of mathematics as well as the relativism of how it might describe our experience, rather than some reality. A belief in the facts of mathematics does not acknowledge the necessary human element in the creation of mathematical knowledge. When we say that two plus two equals four, we are not actually referring to facts about these numbers. The number themselves do not actually exist, they are symbols for mental representations of what we believe to be discrete two-ness or fourness (Kamii, 1985). The same could be said for geometric objects such as a point, line, circle, etc. By definition, a point takes up absolutely no space and a line has no thickness. These things do not actually exist, but we operate on/with them as though they do. Therefore, mathematics cannot be discovered because it does not exist out there; it cannot exist independent of the human mind and experience (Glasersfeld, 1995). ! 66!

Mathematics, then, cannot be a reflection of the universal truths of our world. Rather, it is a way for humans to make sense of their experience and, perhaps, to create imaginary worlds that we cannot experience. There is a relativism here that needs further explanation. Many of the facts of mathematics actually fall apart in certain circumstances. For instance, if you add two quarts of gin and two quarts of vermouth, you will not get four quarts of the mixture as your result but a quantity that is slightly less than that (Kline, 1980). According to Euclidean geometry, any two lines that are not parallel will eventually intersect. However, the claim is not true of other non-Euclidean geometries, each of which is able to describe some part of our experience in the world equally as well as Euclidean geometry. So it seems that our mathematical ways of knowing are actually relative to the ways in which we experience different aspects of our world. Students as Mathematicians These arguments are not new to the conversation around what is math, but they are still somewhat controversial. Particularly for the teacher of mathematics, it raises doubt about the purpose and ethics of their role. Part of my research has led me to grapple with this question and to tease out implications for mathematics teaching and learning. There is much more work to be done here, and I cant say that my attempts have taken many of the above statements to the end of their potential/logical/ethical conclusions. My attempts were mostly to restore the human element to learning ! 67!

and knowing mathematics and to put students in positions of epistemological authority. I tried as much as I could to allow students to act as mathematicians, to position them as creators of knowledge rather than recipients of it. This led me to think about what it is, exactly, that mathematicians do. Paul Lockhart seems to simply describe mathematics and the work of a mathematician, Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity to pose their own problems, to make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs you deny them mathematics itself. (2009, p. 29). I concluded that mathematicians engage in certain habits or repeated behaviors; these behaviors I identified as the habits of a mathematician (Figure 1.5). This, I concluded, is what it looked like for someone to be doing mathematics. As a result, these habits became the center of everything I did with students in the classroom. If students were not engaged in most/all of these habits in their normal daily activity, then I decided it would be safe to say that they were no longer authoring their own mathematics. The goal shifted from delivering or passing on knowledge to engaging students in these behaviors, not as a separate or special activity but ! 68!

as the activity. It began to restore mathematics to the mathematics classroom. FIGURE 1.5 - Habits of a Mathematician 1. Experiment and Play 2. Conjecture and Test 3. Be Confident and Persistent 4. Be Systematic and Organized 5. Solve Simpler or Related Problems 6. Justify and Support Claims 7. Look for Patterns and Regularity 8. Make Generalizations What Did It Look Like? At the most basic level, I just stopped telling students what/how to think and, instead, I helped pose problems for us to think about together. This wasnt an abandonment of the high school math curriculum, but instead of using it as a script for what I was to transfer to students I used it as a place to search for rich areas to start and orient our thinking. I think this is what Dewey suggests in The Child and the Curriculum when he says, the value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus by indirection to direct. Its primary ! value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not for the child. It says 69!

to the teacher: Such and such are the capacities, the fulfillments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves (1902, p. 30). I started looking for problems that I knew would lead students to think about the general areas emphasized in the high school curriculum. Not math problems like we generally know of them in math classes (as exercises to practice different processes or algorithms), but problems that allowed students to engage in sensemaking and allowed them to come to conclusions without any instruction. The following are two examples of problems that students worked on together as part of a unit that was driven by the question What is the area of the Koch Snowflake (a famous fractal)? The first task presented here was designed to get students thinking about infinity, infinite series, and partial summation (Figure 1.6). It allowed them the opportunity to look for patterns, solve simpler problems, conjecture, and justify their ideas. The second task presented here was designed to get students thinking about infinite iteration, convergence, and divergence (Figure 1.7). It allowed them to experiment and play, conjecture and test, look for patterns, create rules and generalizations, and justify and support their claims. Each problem is followed by examples of student work that shows their approach and their attempts at making sense of these ideas on ! 70!

their own and in their own unique way. I have also added bold typeface in places to highlight the habits of a mathematician in their work and reflection. FIGURE 1.6a Squareception (Task)

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FIGURE 1.6b Karen

You start to see a pattern and could become more open minded about the problem you are looking at. For example, the problem Squareception when we needed to find the area of the shaded region, I was stuck. I then stopped looking at the shaded region as a complete square but instead looked at it as a L shape. Eventually, I realized nothing ever changed but just got smaller and smaller even though the size remained the same. The answer I came up with was 1/3 because no matter how much smaller it gets itll always be 1/3. In Karens work and writing about her ideas, you can see her finding patterns as a result of her decision to simplify the problem. She broke the whole shape up into similar L shapes that keep repeating forever. In noticing that the shaded region was always 1/3 of the L she was able to justify her claim about the area of the infinite shaded region. ! 72!

FIGURE 1.6c Alex

We found that you have to take a fourth, and add it by one over four squared, plus one over four cubed, and so on infinitely to find our answer. Once I saw this pattern, I went back to my total areas sheet to work on the unit question, what is the area of the Koch Snowflake? Here, Alex has taken a much different approach than Karen but has arrived at the same conclusion. You can see him finding a way to make sense of the problem that is appropriate for him; he has decided to find the area of each shaded square as a fraction of the entire figure. By seeing patterns there and taking partial sums of the infinite series he was able to draw some conclusions and justify his claim. ! 73!

FIGURE 1.6d Salina

You never able to end it goes

will be to get since for a

infinite amount of times, but by calculating some of the numbers you begin to notice patterns and from there you can make predictions. From these predictions we can begin to create formulas and test them, eventually after experimenting wee will be able to find solutions for the problem. A good example of doing this is in our Squareception problem that had shaded in squares that continued on for infinity. We started to solve for each shaded in square after doing a number of those we began to realize a pattern that the shaded square was 1/3 of the whole square. By doing this we were able to calculate other squares and found that each one is 1/3 of the entire square. It is interesting that Salina acknowledges many of the habits in her work. Even though I dont see all of them in her work sample, she seems to be identifying a certain sequence she uses in creating mathematical claims and in creating her own mathematics. It is hard to tell from her writing here if she has convinced herself of a justification for the claim she is making. I think her idea is similar to Karens, but she has decided to move the shaded square over in realizing this claim.

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FIGURE 1.7a Lost in Iteration (Task)

FIGURE 1.7b Austin

and so on. The only issue with this is that we will not actually get to ten, even though we are adding an infinite amount of times. I know, messes with your head. Whats happening is that we are adding still, but the numbers become very tiny. Were talking about ten digits of decimals kind of small. It would become 9.9999999999 or whatever, but we would just keep adding decimal places in. Even though the initial task is rather open, you can see that it has led Austin to begin to grapple with the idea of convergence. So, without instruction, he has led himself to these ideas and these conclusions. ! 75!

FIGURE 1.7c Andrew

At the top of this work sample, you can see Andrew coming to the same conclusion as Austin. In this sample Andrew also goes on to experiment with other starting rules. You can also see him looking for patterns in his results and formulating some conjectures about what is happening. Interestingly, this experimentation led him to confront the idea of convergence versus divergence. His central question became, why do some rules get close to a specific number while others just keep getting larger? ! 76!

FIGURE 1.7d Erik Iteration and infinity is a weird concept. Every pattern can go on for infinity but something different happens when you divide. When you divide you do not pass a certain number. We were given an expression (x/2 +5) with any real number being x. I started by plugging in random numbers and seeing what would happen. A common pattern was that all numbers never reached 10. If it was below 10 it would be 9.99, if it was above 10 it would be 10.001. This was weird because I thought there would not be a determinable ending point to this pattern. I thought of it as a circle. If you used 10 as x you would never get a new number. If that is true then we could say that other numbers can never jump into the spinning circle of 10. There is no way out of the circle and no way in. It is interesting to see how Erik is reflecting on how he made sense of what was happening with this task. I think you can almost hear him generating a mental model to explain the idea of convergence. SUMMING IT UP It took students a while to get used to the different format of our class. Most students grew to really like the openness, although a few never really saw our activity together as mathematics (it seemed as though, for them, our activity was too far removed from their definition of mathematics). I assembled a focus group of students to help get a more detailed picture of their experience in the classroom with this type of activity and interaction. I asked them questions to try and understand more about how they experience having open questions/activities in class each day. Overwhelmingly, I heard them say things that indicate their enjoyment of being allowed to think for themselves (Figure 1.8). ! 77!

FIGURE 1.8 Focus Group Responses "I like it because it is usually a question that can be answered in a bunch of different ways so every time you hear from somebody its a different answer and it makes you think." "You have to think about it a bit more on your own and develop your own ideas first." "It helps you because you can create your own ideas for how to solve that problem. "We have freedom and, in math, you usually dont think of having freedom. I used to think of math as having a bunch of rules and everything was set and strict. With our open questions, it just kind of blows that concept away. They make you stop and think instead of just memorizing a rule and that will help us outside the classroom or when we have a problem with a rule we dont know." "Its a really nice way to get away from traditional math where its like, heres a worksheet, go figure it outif you dont get it, then tough. I think experimenting and playing with our questions is a great way to get your mind going." They mention freedom, creating their own ideas, experimenting, and the realization that there are multiple ways of making sense of problems. A lot of people talk about the need for developing perseverance in students. While I agree that is important, I wish the discussion was also about self-trust. I wonder if we too often confuse students like Ben as lacking perseverance when what they really lack is the willingness to start, the self-trust that they can figure things out for themselves, or, in short, a sense of agency. All of this, I believe, is

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created by (and can also be mediated by) the ways in which we engage in mathematics with students in our classrooms. So, what happened with Ben? Ben has started to regain his sense of mathematical agency. He eagerly self-starts and often extends problems on his own. When I asked him about his thoughts, here is what he had to say: Going from schooling where I was simply told how to solve a problem, and made to memorize it, I never actually learned how to solve problems, I memorized how to solve problems. And in my adolescence I confused one for the other thinking they were the same. But I soon found that after coming to this school, and more specifically this class, that I didn't really know much of anything pertaining to the creation and solving of mathematical equations in the form of written problems. And this is how I felt the first couple weeks at a new school where I was asked those very questions without any direction as to where to start. But since coming here I think that I could and will solve math problems or attempt them without any direction from a teacher or peer. I think it is clear that students learn much more than mathematics from our classrooms. They form, among other things, expectations about the role of the teacher and student, a definition of mathematics, an identity in relation to that definition of mathematics, and a sense of agency (or lack thereof) that is closely related to their mathematical identity. Rochelle Gutierrez writes ! 79!

that mathematics teachers are identity workers (Gutierrez, 2010). I couldnt agree more. She writes, Educators who take a sociopolitical stance recognize that mathematics education is identity work. Learners are always positioning themselves with respect to the doing of mathematics, their peers, their sense of themselves and their communities, and their futures (2010, p. 17). The very practices that are taken up in the classroom and the meaning of doing mathematics are inextricably tied to the constellation of other identities that students bring to the classroom. Such an acknowledgement opens the doors for us to see that holding an equity stance means recognizing that as a mathematics teacher, one teaches mathematics and so much more than mathematics that influences students development (2010, p. 18). Where do we go from here? What conclusions can we make? In the most immediate sense, I think we must interact with students through problems rather than procedures. Students must have the opportunity to think like a mathematician, to be doing mathematics, not as some sort of add-on to traditional instruction but in place of that instruction. In a more removed sense, I think we must continue to redefine what is mathematics or, perhaps, leave the question unanswered so that we are continuously renegotiating our answer to that question with respect to time, society, and our community of students. Broadening that definition will help us realize that by teaching through questions, and by ! 80!

letting students make sense of questions in their own way, we will inevitably be engaging them in a rich mathematics education.

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