The UJIMA project expands our understanding of the mathematical development of Black youth as a demographic, as well as the curricular supports that can move a mathematics identity from a private, neutral, and implicit space into a public, political, explicit space of learning.

Students’ success in algebra is a key factor for college admission and the potential access that a college degree offers for the future (Moses, 1995). Unfortunately, many students are not succeeding in algebra classes. Research over the past decade has shown that not only can young children think algebraically, but encouraging them to do so is beneficial to future learning of formal algebra.

In order to capitalize on this emergent algebraic thinking, however, grade 6-8 teachers of pre-algebra and algebra courses need to be able to recognize opportunities to elicit the algebraic character of arithmetic and pre-algebraic thinking during instruction. Work in this area has begun. Blanton and Kaput (2003) discuss developing teachers “algebra eyes and ears,” and in prior work I discuss developing teachers’ attention to children’s algebraic thinking. However, this work has primarily focused on children’s ideas as expressed verbally or in writing. Focusing only on verbal and written expression of ideas has limitations, especially for English learners and students who are neurodiverse.

In this project, I will investigate teachers’ attention to multimodal student algebraic thinking and design and investigate a video club PD that uses novel video annotation tools to help support teachers’ multimodal noticing.