Papers by Samantha A Marshall
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 2024
Black students are marginalized in mathematics education in the USA, including through their lang... more Black students are marginalized in mathematics education in the USA, including through their language. However, there is little research on how mathematics teachers can best serve Black Language (BL) speakers. Because BL is a significant sensemaking resource for Black students in mathematics, we investigate how BL-speaking mathematics teach- ers use their language to support BL-speaking students. Drawing on semi-structured inter- views with ten BL-speaking mathematics teachers, we find through thematic analysis that these teachers use BL in three primary ways: (1) as access; (2) as community; and (3) as liberation. These findings provide important implications for teachers of Black students, including that teachers must familiarize themselves with BL, use language to connect with students, make space for BL in the mathematics classroom, and disrupt the marginalization that happens through language.
This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light ... more This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various waysas individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborationsto construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society. Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other.
Teachers as Transformative Actors to Create Meaningful Learning: Agency in Practice, 2023
This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light ... more This international collection of papers examines the many ways teachers exercise agency in light of the challenging realities they and their students face to create caring, engaging and transformative learning environments. The teachers in these studies exercise agency in various waysas individuals, collectives, and fluid inter-professional and personal collaborationsto construct their professional identities and contribute to social change in their schools and society. Across these papers, we also find empirical evidence about the reflexive relationship between individual agency and social structures in shaping each other.
International Journal of Multicultural Education
In response to urgent calls for teaching that is culturally affirming, scholars have developed a ... more In response to urgent calls for teaching that is culturally affirming, scholars have developed a myriad of images of culturally sustaining (and related) pedagogies (CSPs). However, for maths teachers, CSPs remain elusive, in part because these images are typically content-neutral and their applicability to practice opaque. In this paper, I synthesize research to help conceptualize and clarify what CSPs may look like specifically in mathematics classrooms. I offer a framework for CSPs in mathematics comprised of four dimensions: (1) anti-assimilationism, (2) strengths-based teaching, (3) power and justice, and (4) affirming identities.
The Educational Forum
Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking bot... more Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking both the complexity of identity and the contexts in which this work occurs. In this paper, we describe our intersectional approach to research, highlighting its affordances for research on teachers’ learning to support multilingual students. This intersectional lens opens urgent new research questions, invites different types of data, and offers informative analytic approaches to improve both research and practice.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2023
In response to urgent calls for teaching that is culturally affirming, scholars have developed a ... more In response to urgent calls for teaching that is culturally affirming, scholars have developed a myriad of images of culturally sustaining (and related) pedagogies (CSPs). However, for maths teachers, CSPs remain elusive, in part because these images are typically content-neutral and their applicability to practice opaque. In this paper, I synthesize research to help conceptualize and clarify what CSPs may look like specifically in mathematics classrooms. I offer a framework for CSPs in mathematics comprised of four dimensions: (1) antiassimilationism, (2) strengths-based teaching, (3) power and justice, and (4) affirming identities.
The Educational Forum, 2023
Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking bot... more Traditional teacher andragogy models oversimplify teaching multilingual students, overlooking both the complexity of identity and the contexts in which this work occurs. In this paper, we describe our intersectional approach to research, highlighting its affordances for research on teachers’ learning to support multilingual students. This intersectional lens opens urgent new research questions, invites different types of data, and offers informative analytic approaches to improve both research and practice.
Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting
Reframing translanguaging practices to shift mathematics teachers' language ideologies, 2023
While dominant narratives about multilingual students position them as deficient, translanguaging... more While dominant narratives about multilingual students position them as deficient, translanguaging theory has played a critical role in making space for the languaging practices of multilingual students in education. However, we know little about how to best support mathematics teachers' learning about translanguaging. Working with a group of accomplished mathematics teachers taking part in professional development on culturally sustaining pedagogies, in this paper we use frame analysis to examine the ways language ideologies shape teacher sensemaking about translanguaging. We then investigate affordances of classroom video for reframing teachers' conceptualizations of language. We find that although teachers initially framed students' language as a barrier to their success, with the introduction of video clips from mathematics classrooms, teachers began to frame students' language as a tool for productive disciplinary engagement. These findings suggest that video may serve as a valuable resource for reframing teachers' conceptualizations of students' languaging practices in mathematics classrooms.
Teaching and Teacher Education
The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2019
In this paper, we propose a racial solidarity praxis in mathematics education grounded in Black-,... more In this paper, we propose a racial solidarity praxis in mathematics education grounded in Black-, Latinx-, and Indigenous-led scholarship and their respective communities’ joining efforts to combat White supremacy. Increased solidarity across racial groups in mathematics education could illuminate new ways of nourishing and affirming Indigenous, Latinx, and Black students’ racial identities and cultural strengths. We leverage four frameworks: (1) Whiteness as property (a tenet of Critical race theory) and (2) Tribal Critical Race Theory; (3) Latino Critical Theory; and (4) pedagogy of solidarity, to conceptualize the interdependence required for solidarity work and to expose how White supremacy is maintained overtly and covertly in mathematics curriculum, policies and practices. This study outlines the nuances across each community of scholars, drawing on their strengths to combat oppressive educational structures for students. The authors conclude in solidarity, focusing on the way...
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jte-10.1177_00224871211019024 for What Makes Mathematics Teacher... more Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jte-10.1177_00224871211019024 for What Makes Mathematics Teacher Coaching Effective? A Call for a Justice-Oriented Perspective by Samantha A. Marshall and Patricia M. Buenrostro in Journal of Teacher Education
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences -ICLS 2022 , 2022
Although for decades there has been a strong coalition of teachers working for social justice, we... more Although for decades there has been a strong coalition of teachers working for social justice, we still know little about how teachers' learning to do this work can be supported. In this paper, I use interaction analysis to investigate a teachers' learning opportunities, finding that the teacher's learning opportunities were facilitated by coaching strategies including: (1) a co-inquiry approach, (2) deliberate and persistent problem (re)framing, (3) grounding interpretations in student sensemaking, and (4) building on the teacher's pedagogical responsibility. These findings contribute to theory of teachers' learning, suggesting some of the ways in which such learning can be supported in a video-based coaching model.
Teacher Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Instruction, 2022
Teacher Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Mathematics Instruction, 2022
Charles Goodwin's legacy includes a multitude of analytical tools for examining meaning m... more Charles Goodwin's legacy includes a multitude of analytical tools for examining meaning making in interaction. We focus on Goodwin's substrate-"the local, public configuration of action and semiotic resources" available in interaction used to create shared meanings (Goodwin, 2018, p. 32), gathering early career scholars to explore how research designs adapt substrate as an analytical tool for education research in diverse settings. This structured poster session examines how substrate can be used to capture a complex web of learning phenomena and support important analytical shifts, including representing learning processes, privileging members' phenomena to address issues of equity, and understanding shifting power relations through multi-layered and multi-scaled analyses. Session overview Through interaction, humans create meaning with and for each other, drawing on prior experience and building new understandings and possibilities. Applied linguist Charles Goodwin's legacy includes a multitude of analytical tools for examining meaning making in interaction. His book Cooperative Action explicates how people interactively build understanding by using and transforming available resources (Goodwin, 2018). These resources are the substrate-"the local, public configuration of action and semiotic resources" available in interaction used to create shared meanings (Goodwin, 2018, p. 32)-and the focus of this symposium. We gather early career scholars to explore how analytical designs adapt substrate as a tool for research on learning in a variety of settings. We present two sets of analytical designs: Poster Set 1 draws upon practices, artifacts, and interactional histories as substrates, while Poster Set 2 draws upon movement (gesture, full-body, coordinated ensemble) as substrates. Both sets of analytical designs for the use of substrate shed light on how substrate is being incorporated into analysis in the next generation of researchers by addressing a set of shared ICLS 2020 Proceedings 1471 © ISLS
Mathematics teachers develop understandings about instruction across multiple settings, such as c... more Mathematics teachers develop understandings about instruction across multiple settings, such as classrooms, workshops, and professional learning communities. When teacher teams collaborate, their prior teaching and learning experiences meaningfully inform their sensemaking. However, current research does not explicitly link teacher conversations and these multiple settings for learning. In this study, we seek to understand secondary mathematics teachers' collaborative learning in schools as part of broader teacher learning ecologies. Using discourse analysis and a comparative case study design, we examine how two teacher teams' conversations recruit external conceptual resources to support the development of their collective pedagogical judgment. In particular, these external resources offered the teams rich representations of practice and productive framings of teaching problems.
That education is empowering is one of the U.S.'s most sacred tenets; however, for many I... more That education is empowering is one of the U.S.'s most sacred tenets; however, for many Indigenous students, schooling has been intentionally damaging. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, in this article I highlight tribal education leaders' sensemaking about the paradoxes and promises of their work in education, as they navigate the antinomical ideas that education can be both empowering and damaging. Rooting analysis in Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) (Brayboy, 2005), I connect tribal nation-building with various Indigenous educational efforts, including opportunities provided by the charter school movement. Findings highlight values that Indigenous leaders hold for their students' education, including cultural and linguistic sustenance, cultural congruity, and self-determination. Using mathematics as a lens to examine some of the contours of Native education, analysis illuminates complexities inherent in Indigenous education and tribal nation-building.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2020
ABSTRACT Teachers’ decisions are often undergirded by their sense of pedagogical responsibility: ... more ABSTRACT Teachers’ decisions are often undergirded by their sense of pedagogical responsibility: whom and what they feel beholden to. However, research on teacher sensemaking has rarely examined how teachers reason about their pedagogical responsibilities. The study analysed an emotional conversation among urban mathematics teachers about what they teach mathematics for, given the many non-mathematical challenges they and their students face. The familiarity and simplicity of love and life skills narratives deployed to describe what it means to be a good teacher and to do good teaching may be comforting, but limit teachers’ engagement with other authentic forms of pedagogical reasoning about their pedagogical responsibility in complex sociopolitical contexts. The findings reveal the importance of opportunities to explore alternate possibilities ‘for what,’ especially within structured and supportive teacher collaborative groups.
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Papers by Samantha A Marshall