CAREER: Affirming Bilingual Children’s Participation in Mathematics

This project will contribute new knowledge on two aspects of participation in mathematics education. First, this research aims to understand how perceptions of race influence how teachers, future teachers, and researchers assess how bilingual children use their languages and movement to participate in mathematical activity. Second, it will explore ways to counter deficit views that influence teachers’, preservice teachers’, and researchers’ perceptions of these multiple ways of participating as inferior to what is traditionally considered as meaningful participation. The project has the potential to improve bilingual children’s wellbeing by helping teachers to develop mathematics classrooms where children can participate on their own terms. This project will also equip teachers and preservice teachers with the research capacity to potentially transform their own classrooms beyond the duration of the project. These transformations may encourage more bilingual children to pursue careers in mathematics-related fields in the future.

This project seeks to answer the overarching research question: How can teachers and researchers affirm bilingual children’s non-normative participation in mathematics classrooms? Using a participatory design research methodology, the project will bring together a raciolinguistic perspective and embodied cognition to: (1) elicit children’s perspectives on participation, (2) co-design lessons with pre- and in-service teachers, and (3) co-analyze children’s linguistic and embodied ways of participating in these lessons. The PI will collaborate with children and teachers in second, third, and fourth grade, including one classroom per grade level in two schools (six teachers and approximately 250 children). The contrasting racial and linguistic backgrounds of children in the two participating schools offer a unique opportunity to learn about the how children’s linguistic and embodied participation is legitimized and delegitimized given their racialized and linguistic differences. Discourse analysis with a focus on translanguaging and qualitative social network analysis will highlight how students use linguistic and embodied participation to make mathematical meaning. Findings will support educators in affirming racially and linguistically diverse students’ unique ways of participating.