Eva  0:00  
Hello and thank you for listening to the mathematics teacher educator journal podcast. The mathematics teacher educator journal is co sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. My name is Eva Sennheiser. And today I'm talking with Tanya Bertell. From Michigan State University and Courtney Kessler from Ohio University. They co authored a paper with Mary foot from Cooney, Queens College, titled mathematics teachers understanding of privilege and oppression published in the June 2021, issue of the mathematics teacher educator journal, we will begin by summarizing the main points of the article and discuss in more depth the lessons they shared in the article, their successes and challenges, and how these lessons relate to their other work. Tanya, and Courtney, thank you so much for joining me.

Unknown Speaker  0:50  
Thanks for Yeah, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

Eva  0:53  
Can you give us a brief summary of the article including the result?

Tonya Bartell  0:59  
Sure, in this article, we explored a as part of a larger project, we designed it professional development, that I'll just say, was broadly equally focused with a systems perspective. And part of what we were trying to do is really explicitly engage in discussions with teachers about ideas of privilege and oppression, and how those interact in ways that we might see come to life in math classrooms, or schools, and what impact that would then have on their teaching and their decision making. And this article focuses on one activity that we call the levels of oppression activity that we engaged in with teachers where they were given statements that they consider that a statement, and then thought is that playing out at the personal level, the interpersonal level more of a institutional or cultural level. And we explored an analyze to their discussions to try to understand how teachers were coming to see privilege and oppression and how it was at play in math classrooms. And we can go into more or less detail about those levels as you may need. But what we found was that the activity really did support us in engaging teachers in these conversations, we were able to have conversations about how we were thinking about oppression, what it might mean, if it plays out at the individual level of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and the institutional level and policies and procedures, teachers were most comfortable identifying statements within those areas, which is typical of past research, and had a little bit harder time talking about the institutional and cultural levels of oppression, those move into the more abstract, they get beyond the personal level. And they wrestled with questions of what makes something a cultural norm. And realizing that across the group, there are also lots of different ideas of what we might mean by culture. So people were taking that up in in different ways. And so I would say, overall, how we are thinking about this is that it was productive, in engaging in these conversations. And yet, it was limited, because often the conversations were really focused on like institutional or let's just use interpersonal level means an action taken. So if I hear a statement, and it says someone does something, that's an action. And so I'm going to think about that as the interpersonal level. And it didn't necessarily get into ideas of difference into ideas of things like deficit perspectives, and how those play out. And so the implications we think, for math, teacher education, is that as facilitators, that's areas where we need to step in, and explicitly bring up ideas about or ask questions about differences. So it's not just that you have a belief that you have a belief about differences, and how does that play out with respect to privilege and oppression? What is an oppressive, oppressive policy that you actually see in your own practice? And and how might you think about that as reflecting sort of an unwritten rule, or having them think about cultural narratives or stereotypes?

Eva  4:20  
So from listening to and reading the article, it is really about this one task that you have that has four levels of oppression and you have students, you have cat, like many scenarios are that students then are asked to categorize that's, in essence, that task and then the question I think we'll get to later is like, how do we deal with them? Okay, so they were practicing teachers, okay, and who should read this article? Who did you write this article for?

Courtney  4:51  
I think it's for other math teacher educators who are interested in doing work. I think it's for all math teacher educators, but I think it's specifically For other math teacher educators who are interested in thinking about how to do work, specifically related to privilege and oppression, which is an area that math teacher educators have said, they're not super comfortable. And it's difficult. It's complicated. It's messy.

Eva  5:16  
So you say that because you looked at some survey results, is that correct? Can you share a little bit about that?

Tonya Bartell  5:24  
Yeah, in, I'm not going to get the year. But AMT, he actually did a survey of math teacher educators on various questions about supporting equity in their methods courses, I believe it was. And one of the areas identified by math teacher area educators as an area for growth was that they didn't feel that their candidates upon graduation, really had a strong understanding of issues of power and privilege and various systems of oppression, and how those play out in a math context.

Eva  5:59  
So really, that is your problem of practice, right? is like, how do we help teacher candidates? Understand systems of oppression?

Courtney  6:11  
Yeah, and how do we help math teacher educators who are saying this is an area where I'm not sure what to do? How do we help each other as math teacher educators think about engaging in these conversations with our practicing and prospective teachers? Yeah, I wanted to mention that while we focused in this paper about the teachers responses to this, we were, in many ways, alongside the teachers learning with them. And that was that not just this activity, but that was throughout the project we saw the teachers we were working with as colleagues and Tanya earlier had said this project was about a systems approach. So it was about PD for teachers. It was about PD for us as mathematics teacher educators, both at us as faculty, but also the graduate students we were working with, it was about progressive teaching, for the children that were in the teachers classrooms. So it was about different kinds of people that were involved in the project. But I would say that I walked away from this activity and many activities throughout the course of the project with more nuanced and deeper understandings of ideas related to privilege and oppression and other justice.

Eva  7:26  
I feel like that happened to me when I read it yesterday as well. So let's talk a little bit about what existing work you built on when you develop this task, and what theories it's grounded in.

Tonya Bartell  7:39  
Yeah, quite honestly, there's not a lot of work in math education, specifically that, that looks at talking about privilege and oppression, there's work in math education, obviously, in teacher education that draws on or thinks about supporting teachers and becoming culturally relevant, or culturally sustaining teachers. There's work around thinking about asset based versus deficit based perspectives. But there's not a whole lot that relates really supporting teachers in questioning, questioning policies and practices that are reflective of oppressive systems in society. And so we drew on some work outside of math education that did look at excuse me, analysis of oppression by prospective teachers. And some of that work helped us to see that it tends to be really focused on the personal and interpersonal levels, and that teachers need a little bit more support an hour or people need a little bit more support in thinking about those institutional and cultural levels. It also that prior work really suggested to us that this activity had been used. This activity been used by a number of colleagues as well as multicultural education, foundations courses, and this had the potential to engage us in some discussion about these ideas. So not the perfect activity, there is no such thing we're not going to suddenly know everything there is to know about privilege and oppression from one activity. But we thought that it would help us get there. We also liked the fact that it addressed it from multiple levels, that we weren't just thinking about privileged oppression broadly, but that we were thinking about how would that play out when you were speaking one on one with someone? Versus how would that play out with a classroom or school rule or policy that people are following?

Eva  9:35  
Thank you. And I just want to welcome Mary into the conversation. Welcome, Mary.

Mary Foote  9:41  
Thank you, sorry to be late.

Eva  9:43  
No worries. So let's jump into understanding the innovation or the task a little bit in more detail. So could you explain the levels and maybe an example of each and then how does this address the problem of practice? So does this help do the things that you want it to do. And just for the listeners, the task is attached to the article. And all the things are provided. If anybody wants to use it,

Courtney  10:12  
we briefly introduced the teachers to the different levels. And there are different ways to kind to frame different levels of oppression. But we talk to teachers about personal interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels of oppression with fairly brief brief definitions of what those might be. And we talked to them about it, and about them. And then we gave them examples of how these might play out if you want, I could read read some. So for example, and one might be an interpersonal level example might be, I expect to have lower classroom achievement levels. If I have poor students or students of color in my class, an interpersonal level example might be, Sam was fond of telling people that he could proudly say I don't see color, we all belong to the human race. And institutional level example would be the dress code policy focuses on policing what girls wear with rules about specific clothes, they can and cannot wear to school, boys dress, boys dress issues are largely ignored. And finally, a cultural level example would be most of the educators are using curriculum materials that are not reflective, were affirming of the histories and lives of diverse students and community members. And so we had multiple kinds of these statements. And we we divided them up, and we would have teachers read them talk about what how they felt, whether they thought they which level they were, and then justify and talk through their reasoning. Now they could talk with their colleagues to say, I'm not really sure, what do you think and there was that kind of discussion that went on? Yeah, and part of the goal of how that this might support that probable practice was that participants and us would be talking across so we're thinking about a personal level sort of statement that I might have lower expectations for students of color in my class, I may not say it that way. Like we won't say it that way. But that's playing out in my practice, then I can also link that to broader cultural narratives about how, for example, African American boys are portrayed in the media with respect to behavior or violence. So we can talk back and forth between the levels to try to think about how these cultural narratives then might play out in oftentimes invisible ways in our classrooms, when we interact with students or we make decisions about behavior, modification or discipline, or even one math task to use for a particular student or particular group of students.

Eva  12:50  
That actually leads nicely into a follow up question that I have is can you explicate the connection for us on these levels of oppression and mathematics education?

Tonya Bartell  13:06  
Yeah, we purposefully at least initially used statements that were not specific to math education, but were about education more broadly, because we were hoping that the teachers themselves would make the connections to math education, I would also argue like this is bigger than math education, we can give you examples in math education, but it's bigger than that. It's, you know, not unique to math education. At the same time, I think there are some narratives doing this, again, we would bring up so the issues of tracking in mathematics classrooms, for example, is something that we could explicitly talk about, or we could explicitly talk about this broader narrative that some people can do math, and some people cannot and and really position those in particular ways. I don't know very important, you might have other ideas as well.

Mary Foote  13:54  
I think what you're saying is good. The I think the one example that Courtney gave is directly applicable to math ed, that I have, I can't remember specifically what it was, but something along the lines of I expect less, or I don't think that the children of color in my classroom can achieve at the same level. And you can just say that flat out about math. And I think that's a lot of people's attitude.

Courtney  14:20  
Yeah, in the article, we do give more mathy oriented examples of these. But I would argue and I think most of us would argue that this, even the ones that are not don't have math class and the examples these are math, teacher education work, and I think most of us set argue that we need to be doing this kind of work. Those of us who do LGBTQ education, work in math methods, courses, get evaluations and say why do we do this work and math methods courses? Or like we get evaluations that say, where are we talking about race and Math Methods course? Why do we talk about gender? Why do we talk about class because it's related to math methods, right? This is math teacher education. I don't mean to go off on a tangent, but the this is math. This does impact the math classroom is what I'm trying to say. And which is what you started out by saying time. Yeah. And we don't just teach math we teach people. Yeah,

Mary Foote  15:19  
credit teachers bring their whole selves and all of their attitudes that they have, inside and outside of the classroom, to the teaching of mathematics, as well as anything else that they might teach, but specifically to mathematics, they don't leave those ideas at the door, and become a different person with different ideas and orientations when they start to teach math. Yeah, I love.

Courtney  15:43  
Go ahead. I do think that for some people having those more mathy examples, do feel a little bit more comfortable. So I'm glad that those are included.

Eva  15:53  
I want to say I love this activity, because I do a lot of activities with my students, where they explored the results of systemic oppression. But I don't know that seeing systemic or institutional oppression is something that they knew how to do. I think that's something they need to learn. And so I think this is an activity that is really nicely matches other activities, to just talk about being racist or not racist doesn't just mean, do I say something to somebody else? Or is it my intention? It's all in the system? And I think once you see that, it's hard to imagine how not to see it. But I do think a lot of people have no experience seeing that. And this task could really help understand, what does systemic oppression look like? Why is that a thing, which in this country with the whole individualism is just hard to navigate? Right? Sometimes? What do you mean, not everybody has the same chance everywhere, right? Yeah, Ava has been going on reading a lot and exploring a lot and learning a lot. And I feel like, it is not an obvious thing to see if you haven't been taught how to say it. So I think this is a really good task to teach people how to see it. And like you guys said, teachers need to see this, whether they're math teachers or not, so that they can advocate for their students. So it is something that you have to learn every I think

Mary Foote  17:25  
you raised a really good point about how it's maybe particularly difficult in this country, I'm sure it's difficult other places as well. But because we have these national kind of master narratives of everyone having the same chance, equal opportunity, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, rugged individualism. It's so pervasive in the culture of the United States, at least in the white people's culture, that it's good to mount some kind of an effort to examine those narratives.

Eva  18:00  
Yeah. So in my class, we look sometimes at redlining, and then we look at congressional representation, and we look at all those kinds of things. But I think this is going to be such an amazing task to add, because it really allows you to talk about this without necessarily being in a certain context, and it's just everywhere. So I'm in love with this task. I just want to say that. All right, so let's get to the research questions. What research questions did you or study? Look at? And how did you show that this task? Or what did this test do?

Tonya Bartell  18:39  
Let me see the exact research question, I can paraphrase that the was really about trying to under stand weather and how this activity did support teachers in both having discussions about privilege and oppression and also helping us understand how they were understanding these ideas of privilege and oppression at these different levels. And we when we engaged in the activity, we recorded the activity, both video and audio recording of all of the discussions so that we could hear the ways that teachers were talking about the examples, we're talking about how they were thinking about cultural oppression or individual personal levels of oppression. And we tried to look at the ways in which how the teachers talked about it was similar to or different from sort of the brief example, definitions, if you will, that we gave as a way to think about the data does that I don't remember the second part of your question.

Eva  19:35  
I think that's a good start. Now, let's just jump in, what did you learn?

Tonya Bartell  19:40  
I, for me, one of my big takeaways is that there were lots it's hard, we knew that it was going to be hard. We knew that people would have lots of different ideas of all of these things. So listening carefully, was really critical. And this notion of keeping coming back to ideas difference, privilege, oppression, being explicit about race class disability, like really pushing on concrete ideas and examples that go beyond just, oh, personal level is a belief that I have about someone will believe about what a belief about difference? What do we mean by difference? And what what difference? Does that make too many differences. But why does it matter that we think about difference in this particular way and how it plays out? So I really learned that it's important to raise those questions. And as facilitators, it's okay to raise those questions. It's okay to insert into some of those conversations to keep that on the table.

Eva  20:43  
I want to go off topic here, because I am wondering now, what norms you would have had to have established in these rooms to have been able to have some of these discussions because I could see this go all kinds of ways, it was

Mary Foote  20:59  
a small group of participants, first of all, and they had spent this was the on the fifth day right of the first week. So they this was they've been together for four days, and but it wasn't all sunshine and roses, but there had developed a certain level of trust among some of them anyway. And so I can see that it would be a different project, doing this in a larger class, with people who maybe hadn't had as much of a chance to know to have lunch together all the time to have conversations about a variety of things, for one thing, and then we did have a whole set of norms that we went over the first day about don't freeze people in time, I think that was an important one for this particular discussion. And I don't know, the other ones don't come to mind right now. But we did talk about those every day. And so I think that was important in establishing a judgment free zone of communication.

Courtney  21:58  
I, we wrote about this in the paper, but I just keep thinking about this idea of learning alongside teacher, colleagues, right. So we can say that over and over, right? Like we're going to learn alongside you, but there's always going to be that power difference in status going on. And sometimes when we're in these collaborations, there's also this feeling of one teen two to fulfill the task at hand, like we wanted these teachers to go through this process. I'm not necessarily saying it for this one. But there was some of that feeling that we wanted these teachers to go through the process of thinking about these levels of oppression and categorizing. And we in the paper we talked about, we didn't always take, we didn't take the time to problematize. Some of the statements themselves. One of the examples in the article was there was a statement about playing the race card. And that's really problematic. But we didn't take the time to unpack that because we were so invested in the activity. And that's we've probably all been in situations where there's that tension of wanting to get not get through it but fulfill this activity, or we have this learning goal in mind. And but we're also learning alongside but we're also in this role of instructor. There's just so much going on. And it's like fraught with not controversy, but controversy, because it's privilege and oppression, right. There's just so much going on. But also, I think what's really powerful about this piece is that it is a really nice kind of constrained activity, that it can be an entry into this kind of work that you can try out and develop over time. I don't know I have a lot of this fuzziness there were times when we would look at each other as facilitators. Like I don't know if I agree that statement belongs at that level. And so yeah, do I make sure that the teacher says that it belongs at that level or and it really the fuzziness was an important part and unnecessary part of that process that it was okay and necessary to debate and question and wonder, at the same time that we would maybe argue that it was not okay for the conversation to stray too far away from difference privilege impression structures, that piece. So let's get to take there. I think

Eva  24:26  
I'm curious, you talked a little bit about what categorizations were, like, maybe somewhat easier to make, and what were maybe somewhat harder to make. Do you have any data were about people going oh, I never really thought about this or I'm just curious is systemic oppression? Was that a new concept to people? Or do you know

Tonya Bartell  24:50  
depends on who you're talking about? So we had a very diverse group of participants. They had a range of teaching experience. They had a range of teaching experiences. particular community. And we talked a little bit in the article about how some of the teachers in the professional development identified as African American teachers. And so this idea of systemic oppression, they knew it, they lived it, they didn't need to put, you know, a label or a name on it. And so we were also then having to think as facilitators about not wanting to put the burden on like the person of color to teach the white people about systemic oppression. And yet also hearing the stories and the counter narratives and the narratives that the teachers of color were sharing in that space that were really important for their development and learning as well. And so I don't know that necessarily manifested always in arguments about say which level something was at. But it was definitely the case that when people were able to bring stories into the conversation that swayed some folks into thinking in different ways.

Eva  26:02  
Alright, so let's wrap up with I feel like we're summarizing, but that's okay. What new contribution to our field does your article make?

Tonya Bartell  26:12  
I think we talked about some of these things I'm going to I'm going to go with, yes, you can do this in a context with all math teachers, when they come into the professional development and part of their time they're doing math tasks, and part of their time, we're talking about these really important things that impact everything that we do in the classroom. And I would say that only Yes, we can do this. But we need to do this if we really want to think about equitable futures.

Eva  26:40  
So in your situation, it sounded like this was in an intensive PD towards the end of the first week. And wondering if you have suggestions for people who teach methods or content course, if they want to use this task, what will your suggestions be? And I was specifically thinking, should this be like, not an opening task in the course? Because we have to get to know each other? Like, where would you put it in? What advice would you give?

Courtney  27:10  
Like everything? It depends, I've started semesters, saying, here's how we are going to go about this course. And I started off easy. And I think it's both okay. But I don't know, I don't I would not start a Math Methods course with this activity. I wouldn't start on the first day. But I don't think it's wrong to start with the first day with this, but I probably wouldn't. But I don't think I don't know, I guess that's why I say it depends if you can, you know, your context, if

Mary Foote  27:40  
I said before that that was one of the reasons that are one of the norms, but fortuitous things was that they knew each other and there was a certain amount of trust that had been built. But on the other hand, the statements are all like about other people. And so they're removed, they can be removed enough from the personal to obviate the discomfort. So I don't, I'm just trying to agree with Courtney, I think you could do it almost anywhere, anytime. And because there is that ability to disassociate your, your own personal self, from the statements, not that's what you necessarily want to have happen. But even as an entry point, to look at what other people are doing, and identify that and then maybe, at a different time, take on some of the responsibility for you yourself what you're doing.

Courtney  28:34  
It's also this was a long activity. So just from a pragmatic standpoint, and we say this in the article, you use fewer statements, and you might really pick targeted statements based on what you know about the prior learning experiences of the students in your course etc. Mm hmm. I think I'm just thinking about the different kinds of institutions I've worked out to like I've worked at institutions that students entered my course, having a wide knowledge base of frameworks, they knew critical multicultural education, they knew critical theories, they knew those kinds of things, and then other institutions that they were just newer to those kinds of ideas. And so I think it just depends and I could see

Eva  29:19  
this exact activity play out really differently to if you're like a group of newer students versus a group of people who have more background. Alright, I want to give you before we close out a chance to add anything, is there anything else you would like to add or share?

Courtney  29:36  
Thank you for talking about this with us. And I just am going to reiterate that in math education, we have to continue thinking about how we can disrupt oppressive systems to really support learning and thriving of students and children in their lives. And I just really appreciate teachers that allow us opportunities to learn alongside with them because these are difficult, not difficult. Well, they're difficult, but complicated and complex issues that I need to learn more about too.

Mary Foote  30:09  
And I guess I'll just reiterate what Tony was saying. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to talk about this in a map that podcast and I think we need to support each other math educators of all different orientations, shall we say, researcher orientations, to accept the fact that the teaching of mathematics happens in a greater context, like it or not, and so to not be dismissive of people whose work is looking in a different direction than yours because all of that work is ultimately subsumed within the greater US society and in support of children's growth and development along a number of vectors, let's say for one of something else. So thanks so much was really appreciated.

Eva  30:58  
Thank you all for joining us today. And for further information on this topic, you can find the article on the math teacher educator website. This has been your host, Eva Sennheiser. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

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