Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Desiree Harvey
As an elementary school teacher, I have the power of flexibility in my class schedule and
in academic components of the day because I am the person responsible for teaching everything.
Therefore, when I think of ways to ensure that conversations, lessons, and the class culture are
just I automatically come up with ideas to implement during opening and closing meeting,
reading lessons, or the social studies component of the day. For some reason, these times feel the
most natural to open up these dialogues with my students. However, I realize that it is even more
crucial to make sure that your instruction is just in relation to other subjects such as mathematics
and the sciences. These are fields in which students of color have been historically marginalized
and therefore it is important to me to create an environment that empowers students and shows
them a counter narrative that presents them as equally capable and intelligent.
sociopolitical views. The two stances are similar in that they both use math as a tool to disrupt
structures that exist and create space for marginalized identities. The sociocultural perspective
values the incorporation of historical contexts into mathematics and realizes that mathematics
privileges a certain way of being over others. The sociopolitical perspective uses math to bring
attention to social problems and uses math as a tool to solve them. Again, the students can
recognize themselves as change makers and realize the power of what they are learning when
utilized by marginalized communities. The educator with this stance would leverage different
cultural backgrounds in order to make math instruction reflective of the students they are
teaching. In addition, they would be strategic in incorporating the real-world into their
curriculum. This aligns with the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy and has the same benefits
within math instruction as other academic components. If students are able to see and recognize
themselves and have their identities validated while engaging in problem solving they will be
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more engaged and bought into the transformative nature of the material they are learning. They
will understand how sometimes abstract math concepts can affect their reality in their
neighborhoods and will want to use it as a tool to change the systems in place. Recently the
movie Black Panther featured a young woman of color who used mathematics in order to keep
her nation and their hero safe with the latest innovations. This is an example of a person of color
who is utilizing these perspectives in order to harness a field that they are normally excluded
from and use to advance their community. Young students of color who see this film are able to
see themselves in this character and will aspire to be regarded as an intelligent person who was
cultural learning theory. This aligns directly with my stance in believing that students will
knowledge. However, I also align with the idea that collaborative learning groups drive learning
in the classroom for students. Our school rejects the “I do, we do, you do” form of teaching and
therefore even though I grew up learning like this I was assimilated into a culture where this was
not what effective teaching looked like. I am not opposed to this because looking back I can
think of many instances where I was sitting in the AP math classroom and completing steps in
order to solve a problem but had no real understanding of what the concepts meant and why I
was completing the steps to solve. It was not until I took college calculus that I began to
In my math practice, I most identify with the bag of tools concept but would like to grow
towards adopting more of a dynamic problem driven view. During my educational career, I was
taught a lot of strategies that I need to learn when and where to apply in order to solve math
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problems most efficiently. In some aspects, I see this coming through in the way that students are
currently taught math at my school. We focus a lot on facts and skills that students will apply to
tricky problem that they come across. However, I also see the strengths in dynamic problem
solving and would like that to drive my instruction more than the bag of tools concept. At
Brooke Charter, we try to push this type of conceptualization of math during a component of the
day called logic stories. During logic stories the students are presented with a challenging word
problem that is not directly connected to what they are learning in math and must try to problem
solve. The practice of this skill is supposed to then transfer over to their problem solving on
assessments and in math class but doesn’t always because of a disconnect between when they
believe they can apply the problem-solving strategies. By working towards a dynamic problem