2025: Empowering the Future through Education, Diversity, and Hope
What’s Inside their Backpacks? Discovering Students’ Assets to Support Mathematical Learning
Location
Hemmingson Ballroom
Start Date
15-4-2025 12:40 PM
End Date
15-4-2025 1:40 PM
Description
Leaders in mathematics education assert that asset-based perspectives cultivate inclusive classroom spaces where students see themselves as capable learners and doers of mathematics (ASSM & AMTE, (2024). The five equity-based mathematics teaching practices—going deep with mathematics, leveraging multiple mathematical competencies, affirming mathematics learners’ identities, challenging spaces of marginality, and drawing upon multiple resources of knowledge—are central to strengthening mathematical learning and cultivating positive student mathematical identities (Aguirre et al., 2024). Preparing pre-service teachers with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enact these practices is critical to creating inclusive spaces where students’ mathematical brilliance is acknowledged and illuminated (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). One key equity-based teaching practice, drawing upon multiple resources of knowledge, focuses on leveraging students’ knowledge and experiences—mathematical, cultural, linguistic, peer, family, and community—as resources for mathematics teaching and learning. This practice involves understanding students through these lenses and using this knowledge to support their mathematical learning. In an elementary mathematics methods course and aligned field experience that I teach, pre-service teachers develop their practice by conducting interviews with elementary students. These interviews aim to uncover students’ interests, home and community knowledge bases and resources, and ideas and dispositions related to mathematics (Bartell et al., 2017). In these conversations, pre-service teachers discover what is “tucked away” in students’ metaphorical backpacks—that is, they learn and identify the assets students bring with them each day. Pre-service teachers are then challenged to leverage these assets to inform their planning of instructional activities. In this poster presentation, three pre-service teacher candidates will report what they learned from their student interviews and how they imagine leveraging these assets to support students’ mathematical learning. As the instructor of the class, I will report themes observed in my students’ narrative synthesis related to their development of this practice.
Recommended Citation
Nitta, Kathleen; Hogan, Ella; Lander, Caroline; and Young, Sydney, "What’s Inside their Backpacks? Discovering Students’ Assets to Support Mathematical Learning" (2025). Diversity & Social Justice in Education Conference. 32.
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/dsjconf/2025/general/32
Publication Date
2025
What’s Inside their Backpacks? Discovering Students’ Assets to Support Mathematical Learning
Hemmingson Ballroom
Leaders in mathematics education assert that asset-based perspectives cultivate inclusive classroom spaces where students see themselves as capable learners and doers of mathematics (ASSM & AMTE, (2024). The five equity-based mathematics teaching practices—going deep with mathematics, leveraging multiple mathematical competencies, affirming mathematics learners’ identities, challenging spaces of marginality, and drawing upon multiple resources of knowledge—are central to strengthening mathematical learning and cultivating positive student mathematical identities (Aguirre et al., 2024). Preparing pre-service teachers with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enact these practices is critical to creating inclusive spaces where students’ mathematical brilliance is acknowledged and illuminated (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). One key equity-based teaching practice, drawing upon multiple resources of knowledge, focuses on leveraging students’ knowledge and experiences—mathematical, cultural, linguistic, peer, family, and community—as resources for mathematics teaching and learning. This practice involves understanding students through these lenses and using this knowledge to support their mathematical learning. In an elementary mathematics methods course and aligned field experience that I teach, pre-service teachers develop their practice by conducting interviews with elementary students. These interviews aim to uncover students’ interests, home and community knowledge bases and resources, and ideas and dispositions related to mathematics (Bartell et al., 2017). In these conversations, pre-service teachers discover what is “tucked away” in students’ metaphorical backpacks—that is, they learn and identify the assets students bring with them each day. Pre-service teachers are then challenged to leverage these assets to inform their planning of instructional activities. In this poster presentation, three pre-service teacher candidates will report what they learned from their student interviews and how they imagine leveraging these assets to support students’ mathematical learning. As the instructor of the class, I will report themes observed in my students’ narrative synthesis related to their development of this practice.
Comments
Poster Session B