Jasmine Y. Ma

Learning to Teach in the Figured World of Reform Mathematics: Negotiating New Models of Identity

Starting from the assertion that traditional and reform mathematics pedagogy constitute two distinct figured worlds of teaching and learning, the authors explore the initiation of prospective teachers into the figured world of reform mathematics pedagogy. To become successful teachers in reform-oriented classrooms, prospective teachers must learn more than pedagogical tools and moves: They must understand what it is to participate in the figured world of reform pedagogy, develop models of identities for participants in this world, and negotiate new constructions of mathematics. In this article the authors present three episodes from an elementary mathematics teacher education class where positions of “teacher” and “child” were offered by instructors in activities designed to approximate practice in the reform figured world. Students negotiated new models of identity and conceptions of mathematics as they took up these positions in varying ways.

Designing Disruptions for Productive Hybridity: The Case of Walking Scale Geometry

This article explores an alternative strategy for designing hybrid instructional environments. Rather than bridging home or community funds of knowledge with school learning, I propose designing disruptions to typical school practices to invite students to recruit out-of-school resources meaningful and sensible to them in order to grapple with school-valued concepts. I examine this design strategy first conceptually, then through a case called walking scale geometry, designed to disrupt the scale of typical classroom geometry. This major disruption has 4 interrelated consequences in that students must invent new tools and strategies for constructing geometry figures, spaces of activity and learning shift, students are positioned with new visual perspectives, and the division of labor is redistributed. I analyze how these 4 consequences played out in an episode of walking scale geometry, in relation to the deployment of student-recruited resources and conceptual agency, then comment on some implications for designing disruptions and hybrid learning settings.

The Spatial Production of Learning Opportunities in Skateboard Parks

Drawing on an ethnographic study of skateboarders, we examine how learning occurs in two city skateparks. We consider the dialectical relationship between participants’ activity and setting, or individually experienced spaces of the skateparks. Individuals edit these settings in activity, even as activity generates setting, and space is socially produced in the collective editing and activity of participants. Learning opportunities, or access to participation in the communities of practice of the parks, emerge from this spatial production. In the two skateparks these learning opportunities were inseparable from other skateboarding activity; spaces of teaching, learning, and skating overlapped and mutually elaborated each other.

Family meshworks: children’s geographies and collective ambulatory sense-making in an immersive mathematics exhibition

ABSTRACT We present a video-based study of family visits to Taping Shape, an immersive exhibition that allows visitors to explore the inside of geometric objects. The exhibition was designed to support embodied sense-making, intimacy, and material encounter with mathematical objects. This study builds on research on walking and movement as forms of place- and sense-making. We draw on the notion of a meshwork to examine how children and their families co-produce, develop familiarity with, and assemble meanings for the exhibition space. This case study focuses on 4-year-old Easton and his extended family, exploring how Easton’s talk and movements are part of an intergenerational meshwork that weaves together an emergent and distributed sense of place within the built geometries of Taping Shape. Our findings further considerations of embodiment and materiality in children’s geographies.