0:00 Hello and thank you for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. The teaching math teaching podcast is sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators. Your hosts are Eva Sennheiser myself, dusty Jones, and Joel Amidon who unfortunately cannot be with us today. Today we're talking with Kathie Lee, who is an assistant professor at the attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University. We are talking to Katherine for many reasons, but partially also because she's playing a large advocacy role in mathematics, education and beyond. Welcome castlerea thank you so much for joining us. And please take a little bit of time to introduce yourself. It's such an honor to be here. Thank you. My name is Katherine gay, preferred pronouns she her her. I'm a math educator, a proud immigrant, Chinese American. I'm one of the CO creators of mis education, Twitter chat with grace Chen from Vanderbilt. I consider myself a mother's scholar, that my children, and being a mother greatly shaped how I look at teaching and research. And I consider myself a community organizer, just for those who might not have picked up on the MIS education. Could you spell that out? Or tell us how we find that hashtag? Sure. So it's on Twitter. It's the Twitter handle or hashtag MISED Uc, a SIA en. It's basically the combination of mis education of Asian American, don't miss a juke Asian. So you finish your introduction with saying you're a community organizer. Do you want to get started telling us a little bit about that? Sure. I think this is a part that many in the method community may know or not know. I live in California, which has pretty progressive policies that time. So for the last three years, my family and I've been very active within our local community. It started three years ago, when my city very small city called Los Alamitos passed an ordinance or a local city law to go against the California values act, SB 54, which means that my city wanted to use taxpayer money, our local city money to make schools, churches, hospitals, no longer a sanctuary space. That means children and families can be separated at these spaces when they were considered safe haven. So what my family and I did with other community members, we started our own nonprofit, our own community based org called Los Alamitos, community united and and we in partnership with ACLU sued our own city. It's been now three years, about a half of about four months ago, we won or lost 2:59 our city. Yes, I know, right. It's huge. We won our lawsuit, our city has repealed the anti sanctuary or them, and is working to put together a human relations task force to show to our communities that everyone belongs. We've also recently been pushing for ethnic studies curriculum, because we believe that these perspectives about immigrant communities about folks of color change begins at school. So within our local community as well, we've also passed implementation of K through 12 implementation of ethnic studies as a curricular and pedagogical project, and also has a high school requirement. And I'm also doing this work supporting other local city to do this as well. So yeah, that's a little bit about what I've been doing outside of Oregon connection to method. Yeah, that was gonna be my next question is, let's tie this to your work as a math educator, I would say has transformed my perspective about math education. I think often math Ed, we've study a lot within our field. What I've been really helpful for me is to look beyond my field. I think studies has a rich, rich history that started with a third world movement in San Francisco and Berkeley, coming from folks of color, wanting to have curriculum that represented them and taught by people that look like them. And that has been a movement that has 50 years of history, where even within workshops and conferences that's being held, these workshops and conferences are free. You pay as you go, you pay as much as you can. And these workshops are throughout our state in our country. These workshops are led by community members, where it might be a local youth organizer, talking about ethnic studies curriculum and leading it with two other you are community members leading it to other community members. Mass ed is not there yet. And we have conferences about equity, it's often us and teaching 5:00 And in research or in math, talking about equity and talking about people. So let's hear a little bit about how you got started on your journey to become who you are today. So you started out as a teacher. So I've been in an education for 20 years, and I taught in downtown Los Angeles. As a bilingual teacher, I taught in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and English, I was right on the outskirts of Chinatown. And as a teacher, even during my student teaching, I was greatly influenced by Louis small, and also Martha Seville, around community funds of knowledge. So as a classroom teacher, I made home visits to every one of my student home. So I've been to over 300, and I'm still in contact with 60% of my students, they're now in their 30. And they'll come in every semester to my class, to hang out with my future teacher candidates, to talk about the power of relationships, and the power that teachers have in impacting the lives of students, and their sense of belonging. So that's how I started off as a classroom teacher, that's really impressive and impactful, I think that statement that those students that you had, from all those years ago, still are in contact with you, you know, for one thing, they're still in contact with you. And those relationships that you built, were so valuable and valued by everyone, but then to think of how you're leveraging their experiences to help your future teachers now, I think, is an incredible, incredible way to kind of integrate all of these different aspects of your life together. That's really cool, I'd say. So when I defended my dissertation, I my dissertation was on culturally responsive and linguistically responsive math instruction, where my dissertation took place in a in a bilingual Spanish English classroom, you know, doing the transcripts was like really hard, like my MBAs and all those things. So it was a parent from my fourth year teaching, that looked through all of my transcripts, and fix, and I corrected it. And when I defended, I had the parents and even teach students from my first year classroom teaching in that space with me, and of course, my own children. And it was such a powerful experience for me, because I wouldn't be there without them. And I wanted them to realize that for any of us, for me to be where I am now, to even get a PhD, it was because it was through them, that inspired me, because I felt that for too long, what's published and research and even in teaching is still too much, even from a place of love, from a deficit perspective around students of color in urban settings, and an Aussie students with multiple social identity, you know, students who to be any cause that multiple marginalized, where you're a person of color, and you've also been classified with a disability. And these students, I wouldn't be who I am without them. I think first and foremost, I'm really a learner. of them. I don't even know how to continue because I feel like what we talked about earlier, when you said Ms. education community, isn't there yet to learn from the community, rather, I don't want to put words in your head, I'm explaining what I heard. Rather that we are talking to each other rather than drawing broader in in your own story. you're sharing how you have been learning with everybody around you. I would like to kind of follow through from when you defended your dissertation. What is your work focusing on? Or what has your work been focusing on between then and now? You know, that's so funny. My work has, I'm going up for my tenure review and another year. And then when you look at my work, I look like I'm all over the place. You know, I'll be honest with you, and then I realized, it connects to my children. That's why I say that I'm first and foremost, the mother scholar, my oldest child has multiple disabilities. And for me much of my time, I teach graduate students that at Chapman, my Teacher, teacher ed courses, but those are in the evening. So I spend probably three out of five days in the classroom. And right now, I'm in classrooms with students who are in separated classrooms classified as being in special ed with mild, moderate, severe disability, and they're also folks of color like me and my child. And my research shifted there for the last four years, because I knew I had a lot to learn. As a mother, I felt like I realized I kept trying to fix my child. 10:00 I wanted her to be like me, or what I thought she needed to be to be successful. And even with good intentions, I call it the pedagogy of fear. I'm worried that the world will miss that term. So then I try to conform her. But her disability is her social is her as part of her identity. We don't often consider disability a cultural identity, but it is, it's created by the environment, because we look at the overall classification of our black and brown boys. But it's also part of who they are, that needs to be honored. So I've been going into classrooms, just being with children and teachers, with focus on capturing how brilliant children are all children across social identities, particularly those with classified disability. And that has been transformative for me, I think it has been really helpful for our field. Because the field of mass education and special education has always been separate. And even for myself, I was really privileged to get to work on catalyzing change, early childhood and elementary school mathematics. And we were very intentional on the chapter on equitable instruction, where the teacher that captures what equable instruction and collaborative learning and problem solving looks like, was a special educator working with all students with disabilities. And they were they're brilliant. They're working on grade level standards. They're working collaboratively. They're working on problem solving. Because for too long, I have teachers asking me, how do I teach kids with disability? What kind of intervention should I use, as if all 30 classifications of disability all need one specific type of instruction, instead of saying we would never say, what's the best instruction for Asian children, or Asian children can't do math, but we would say that about doing where one of their social identity is that they have a disability. So that has greatly shaped my life. My second child is gender fluid. So Lori, and I recently wrote about querying mathematics, challenging binary distinction, l has greatly shaped how I look at identity, and how I look at myself. 12:16 And I often talk about label and binary distinction. How in math edits, so pervasive, higher, low, smarter, not faster, slow. And all these things that we do, where we try to score and split into these binary waves are harmful for all of us, or even female or male, masculine or feminine. These are all socially constructed. So these are all things that I focus on in classrooms, to my teaching, to how to do this in very concrete ways to then my research, and working with others who know so much more than me, because I'm just learning around about this right now. So could you talk to us a little bit about how your methods classes are set up, and how you incorporate some of the things you talked about into those classes. I start that on day one, with the descriptions of challenging labeled around children. I always start with the story of Nora, by Hogan, which is you see these two narratives of Nora screaming Norn. Sounds great. And I pass out this three to four page description of them. It's really short. And it's just a narration of how they position Nora, we're Nora in sixth grade, she's considered an A plus student. And in seventh grade, she's a D student who they think has a disability. And I give half the class sixth grade Nora, half the class seventh grade, Nora, and I tell them, and I explicitly state, our students sense of mathematical identity is shaped by the social environment of the classroom. I want you to start mapping out, what do you notice about nor as a math learner? And what do you notice about the classroom environment? I want you to be as explicit as you can, you know, naming out the exact things that's happening in the classroom, classroom discourse, the norms and rules, the type of language that had the tasks that are given. And then they do a gallery walk in person or virtual. And my students during the guy walk always go, did you give us to Norris? These are two different doors, but you just call them both Nora. And it shocks them that it's the same juden 14:36 it is the same student and how that student feels about herself. 14:42 And how the teacher positions that student in very gendered ways because the teacher literally says, Nora is a hard worker. She's really sweet. But she probably has a disability positioning this lane and perspective of being the submissive, quiet girl and it's so powerful for us throughout the 15:00 The whole semester, we start looking at our classroom spaces through the eyes of Nora. And then from that moment on, I have a community based project where every one of my students is paired up with a student in some Ghana, our neighboring city. And for the first five weeks, they go on community walks with that child and that family, they get to know the child, they engage an activity called photovoice, where that child shares photos about him or her or their self, and and around how they see mathematics in their own world, then weeks five through 15, they start to teach and co teach with that child and with other kids, designing lessons that's relevant from that's relevant to their lives, that's relevant to their ways of knowing and being biggest 25% of those students also have a classified disability, with the goal of letting the teachers to center on how brilliant our children are. But all teaching events are videotaped on goliat. And we have opportunities and to watch those lessons together. So that's a bit a little bit tidbit about how I try to center that. So if anybody's interested in that tale of two noras, that you mentioned, if you just Google it, it pops right up. And I can gladly share a folder where I have the two Nora segments already separated. And also my prompt. So would you like me to email that to? That would be great. We could link that to the show notes. That sounds like a great idea. Glad to dusty, I'm gonna let you ask a few questions. So you've been answering a lot of the questions I'm thinking of. So that's really good. I feel like we're on the same track. Could you tell me a little more about how mis education got started? And what sort of stuff I can find. I mean, I know I can go look on Twitter, but I'm talking with you right now. So can you tell me a little bit about how the origin story of that? Sure, that origin story started about at a retreat for Asian American educators better committed to being community activists, or educational community activists. And it was put together by Kevin Chroma Shira, amazing Asian American educator, that's been really influential in multicultural education and ethnic studies movement as well. So a bunch of us Asian American came together that are all know pretty decently new tenure track faculty or graduate students. We're just building community learning about activist frameworks, and how that can be applied to our role as an academia. Right, and grace Chen at Vanderbilt, and I said, You know what, there's no community space for us. Like, I don't know, any space where it focuses on Asian Americans, and our role as critical educators and critical scholars. And that talks about this work as building from social movement theory and creating community around that. So we started mis education, this idea that for too long, Asian Americans have not been in the narrative around issues of equity. And when we are, we're intentionally positioned in data, 18:17 or an other way to go against our black and brown brothers and sisters of color. Like we become the rationale around Oh, yeah, is folks of color worked hard enough, you can challenge structural inequity. And that's what Asian American data is thrown in right? In Americans are doing great. And they treat us as if we were one large, monolithic group. So we wanted a space where we can learn from each other, we can unlearn to no longer be silent, to not be fall prey to being used for white supremacy, and that we can build community. So that was a space intentionally created, centering our voices, and intentionally challenging whiteness, and half Asian American role and whiteness. So it doesn't consist of just educators, we meet monthly, and even more than that, where we highlight, it can be a community, an Asian American community organizer. It might be a classroom teacher, or researcher, with the goal of providing collective space for us to learn from each other. It's been about a little over a year, and it's a growing group of about 1000 or so. Wow, that's great. It has been amazing. I think about how I did not have a professor I did not know a professor or even a teacher that looked like me until three years ago. Wow. Right. My child has until Hamilton has never seen a person who had a main role on stage that look like them, or even a person that ran for political office. So this sense of disequilibrium because you have been invisible so long, when we meet monthly on those monthly Twitter chats, all 20:00 I would say almost every one of us talk about how it's painful. 20:06 Because we have been invisible or made invisible for so long. So it's been a, I'm very grateful for that space and the community and others who are part of it. It's really inspiring to hear the different ways you're advocating for the brilliance in students, and helping correctly educate folks about what's happening in the lives of people who have been marginalized, and sidelined and are just not discussed or treated poorly. I'm wondering if you can put on your think about into the future, a strange thing of a metaphor, but I can't. So if you were to look into the future, let's say, I don't know, 510 20 years, you've been in education for 20 years. So if you think 20 years from now, what sort of things do you hope to see for, for your current students, for your children? What are your aspirations for that? I think my greatest aspiration is that we support each other and our students to challenge conformity, to challenge us ideas that our work should be about following rule. Particular as an Asian American, there is a false narrative that, and we're often often positioned as that that we're really quiet. And we're really good at following any rules that's been assigned to us, even at time 21:26 losing our own cultural identity, so losing our culture, our language, to conform to what it means to be American in the US, and which is the often white heteronormative monolingual. And which most of us, many of us are not. And I hope with a mass Ed and our students, we haven't analyzed rules deeply. No one, do we follow rule? When do we not starting from the classroom as a math teacher? You know, which rules do we follow when our rules created creating conjecture? Right? So does this work all the time, does it not? When does it when does it not? So moving away from a binary distinction, but really looking at context, and to realize that oftentimes, you want our students to break the rule, because some rules are meant to be broken, because they were problematic to begin with, then we look at any movement in time, and my love for movement, very social movement, very often the things that a progress we've made, it's because folks have refused to allow the rules to define them. So I would love for us within math and within classroom, just think about the fact that our goal is not to conform, our goal is not to always follow the rules, because the rules are created, academia was created, not for all of us. And if we're really to think about equity and social justice, we can't keep looking at little tweaks, because the structure itself is broken. Like we can't look at our classrooms and say, and say teachers need to do all these things, without looking at ability, grouping and tracking and systems that track our teachers and our students. Right. So we have to look at the system as a whole and what needs to be done differently. And I'm excited for that. Because I think we're really starting to do that now. We're challenging. I think COVID has made explicit, we're also tired. But what's happening is a new, like, our goal isn't to go back to normal because normal is what got us here, right? It was the individualism, the competition, you know, who can have like who can have the most amount of toilet paper? Right? It's the sense of sparsity, this false sense of scarcity that is hurting all of us. So I love dusties, large scale question, and I'm gonna do exactly the opposite. If you would give a piece of advice to somebody who's starting out as either a teacher or a math teacher educator, what advice would you give teaching in the classroom or in academia is very lonely. 24:08 I think Laurie talks about the egg cart model, the current model where we're all in our own little eggs and the cartons are right next to each other, but we're all like isolated. I think throughout my whole time, in academia in the classroom, I often felt like I didn't belong. And I think it was just more so in the last three years with my community organizing work, that I realized that it doesn't have to be that way. We have to build community. Don't do anything by yourself. Spend more time with other teacher because there's so much to learn with and from them. And it's also makes it so much joyful. Reach out to mentors that you admire, you read a book or an article, contact them and work with others. You know, I've been working with Ava and a few others within my 25:00 Teaching and in my research, and it's so joyful, and makes work joyful, it makes work fun. It makes me realize that this feeling that I am not enough all the time, I am enough, because I don't need to do it all by myself, we are enough together. I think that's the most powerful thing in every way possible. Challenge individualism, challenge this idea that you need to know it all or be at all, because knowledge is we know, come from and with other. 25:36 So I'm trying to figure out how to close out this podcast. And I'm thinking about how incredibly much I admire your work category and how I'm learning from you. As I'm listening back to the podcast, I'm trying to listen to what the messages were in here. And one message that comes loud and strong from you, every time I talk to you, is this notion of loving all your students working with all your students, seeing the brilliance in all your students. Don't put students in different categories. I love the egg carton thing, or different pigeonholes, but work together with them as a community, everybody can learn from each other. I was new to the task that you mentioned about the two Nora's and as I've been working my way through the paper and the assignment, I would think that's one of the most powerful assignments to see how the exact same child can be very different children in very different environments. And it's up to us, 27:04 in some part to make sure that we don't harm the children. Does that seem a fair summary of what you said? I think so. And can I just thank you. I think this podcast is such an amazing space to center an uplift math educator. I think so many of us right now, across many different spaces where remote learning or homeschooling, I would say I feel like I'm not enough almost every day. And not enough. As a parent. I'm not enough as an educator. I'm not doing enough in our communities, because so many people are hurting right now. And so many people are scared. Every time I talk to you, Eva, you are so generous, you remind me that I am a natural what I am right now. I just want to thank you, I would say and this just reminded me of one more resource I want to make sure we put out there is that you are amazing. Will you just quickly talk about these videos that you have created since COVID crisis hit and where they are so people can access those? Oh, yeah, these are so much fun. Okay, we can probably talk about math. It's like joyful. Okay. So we have a chat, you math play website. And it started. And for those of you who are thinking about student teaching, and how you engage your student teachers, in mathematics experiences when they may not have access to children in classrooms, we started the Chapman you math play series as a place for my students who are future teachers to create lessons that centered on mathematical play and problem solving using everyday things that's around us because math should build from what's around us. That's differentiated in the sense that it allows and supports learning for children from K through six and every activity. And it's also honoring children's first languages. So Chapman use math play, if you go on to that site has tons of activities that are growing every month. And these are math activities done by myself and my students. that's available in English, Chinese and Spanish. We also noticed that there were not a lot of videos that talked about how to engage in problem solving activities using daily resources. That was always available that wasn't a dubbed over in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese, but it was spoken in someone's native language and the heritage language and with communities in which children that use that language as well. All the activities and videos are around two to four minutes so they're quite short, and they all play bass and cover everything from geometric reasoning, algebraic sense making to numbers and operation all through play. dusty, last chance 30:00 Just I was peeking around in there. I know I said, I'm not going to go on the internet while we're having this discussion. But I heard mass play and I thought I had to go look at that. Wow, those are awesome. So there's videos, people can use those at home. I guess teachers could use these in the classroom. And if you click on the description section, if you go to extend on the description, the videos, you'll notice there's hyperlinks we're using like a website than where we it's hyperlinked on and there's also handouts. So handouts in English and Spanish that talks about where's the math? How do you differentiate across grade levels? And also, questions to ask that move beyond the answer to reasoning sense making collective problem solving building from each other. So make sure you check out the description, extended description section, each one of them as well. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, kasseri, for joining us today. It is such a deep, deep honor. I'm really grateful for your time for both of you. And thinking about Joel as well, where he's here with us. 31:04 He always is. Thank you again, for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast, we hope that you're able to implement something that you heard and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators.