What is Community?

All mathematics educators teach in communities: they teach a community of learners, in a larger school community, in a geographic community, and as members of a community of educators. Within these multiple, connected communities, competing understandings of the term ‘community’ underscore a challenge for teaching mathematics in a community-engaged way. 

Background

The definition of ‘community’ is contextual, appearing in academic and practical texts in numerous ways. Community appears in the theoretical construct of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) via racial, kinship, and geographic communities, as well as in contrast to the academy (Yosso, 2005). Murrell (2001) uses community to define ‘community teachers,’ a definition which encapsulates cultural, political, and racial identities; how teachers connect to the context and relationships in and around schools; and how teachers partner with leaders. Gist (2022) defines community in two ways: first as geographic, bounded by neighborhood or region, and second as institutional where the school “community” includes those directly connected to the school. 

Community is also a focus of mathematics teacher education (MTE). The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators uses the term community to represent “mathematics teacher educator community,” “mathematics educator community,” “classroom community,” “wider community,” “community centers,” and “community/family funds of knowledge” (Bezuk, et al., 2017). These different meanings of community overlap but are not exactly the same: the “community” in “mathematics educator community” is a different community from one that uses a “community center.”

Teachers are tasked with actualizing these definitions in their practice, without clarity on which meaning is intended. Moreover, teachers enter the profession with ideas about the communities to which they belong; lived definitions which may vary significantly from one teacher to the next. This lack of clarity may lead a teacher to substitute a personal rather than a shared definition when asked to be responsive to “diverse community needs” (Bezuk, et al., 2017, p. 42).

We approach community-engaged work from different positions in MTE, highlighting the influence of our respective positionalities in the knowledge and framing we bring to this work. We also acknowledge our privilege and proximity to power, both through our experience in positions of authority over pre-service teachers (PSTs), and our respective racial identities (the first author is white, the second author is South Asian).  In addition to our roles as critically-oriented mathematics teacher educators, the first author also has led the development of Full Service Community Schools. The second author taught PSTs in the same metropolitan “community” she grew up in and shared social identities with her students.

These lived experiences allowed us to dialogue about “community,” where we posed the following question for ourselves:

• How can PSTs become grounded in community when the definitions are wide ranging and may not overlap with their lived understanding of community?

Below, we suggest one way to align PSTs’ understandings of community in an MTE classroom.

Intervention

Guided by Murrell’s (2001) definition of a community teacher and Yosso’s (2005) theoretical framework of Community Cultural Wealth, we designed a series of learning experiences to develop new conceptions of “community” in reference to PSTs’ K-12 students. The first author’s intervention took place in the student teaching year of a secondary mathematics education program at a public southeastern university characterized as a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). The second author’s intervention took place within a course in the first year of a middle grades mathematics education certification program at a public university in the South, classified as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI). In both contexts, the PSTs were representative of the university’s identification as either a PWI, or an HSI and AANAPISI, and in both the majority were women.

A beginning-of-semester survey led by the second author provided both authors with a starting point for PSTs’ conceptions of community. This survey included the questions “how do you define ‘community’?” and “what community(ies) are you a part of?”  Students' responses from this survey reflected a wide variety of conceptions of community, suggesting misunderstandings within our classes that threatened confusion. Examples ranged from racial identities to participation in hobbies, with little connection to a broader shared definition.

In response, both authors engaged PSTs in an intervention: a set of activities that would help them to refine their ideas of ‘community,’ using the CCW framework. The first activity was a social location assignment, where PSTs reflected on their most salient social location identities (e.g., race, economic class, gender, religion). Second, using samples of these identities, students developed personal definitions of Yosso’s (2005) forms of CCW by connecting their identities to six forms of capital (i.e., familial, social, navigational, aspirational, linguistic, and resistant). For example, in the first author’s class, each student brainstormed examples of their own aspirational capital.  From here, the third activity focused on schools and schooling. Students were asked to focus on salient social locations that manifested in their own experience in schools, in an effort to identify both deficit and asset ways to frame those social locations. In the second author’s class, PSTs pulled quotes from their social locations and their classmates’ to match with the form of capital they felt was most appropriate. Finally, PSTs moved from their personal experiences into understanding their experiences in the field as preservice mathematics educators. In the first author’s class, PSTs were asked reflected in journal entries about which forms of CCW were apparent in their local school contexts, and which forms their mathematics placements did not account for.  

We discovered that in our two contexts, students engaged with ideas of community in distinct ways. In the second author’s course, students recognized culture as broader and more fluid than any individual identity or one group of people, and as including place and generation. In the first author’s course, PSTs focused on the “wealth” of their students’ assets, while highlighting that schools often focused on students’ deficits. Ultimately, these series of activities posed more questions than we hoped to answer but underscored in both contexts the need to center community in our mathematics methods classes to build shared meaning and “peel back practices, regulations, or policies that contribute to inequitable educational outcomes for local school and community members" (Gist, 2022, p. 6).

Discussion

We now work under the premise that the definition of community is nuanced and multifaceted, and is constantly negotiated and adapted depending on context. One community we were able to better define was the “school community,” which we define as the group of students, families, and geographically proximate people who are impacted by what happens at the school. More precisely, one way to define that school community is to identify, articulate, and value these individuals assets bring to the school, thereby illuminating how a community thrives, and how mathematics teachers can support and be supported by the community as they teach math. In this intervention, a first step for our PSTs was to reflect on this multifaceted process by identifying what their assets are, using Community Cultural Wealth.

We have found that our efforts to define community speak to a larger issue in MTE. Frequently, we ask our PSTs to break down mathematical concepts for students, and clearly define key terms and ideas, like “area” or “perimeter.” We do not do this as well for complex social ideas like “community” or “assets.” Importantly, this intervention did so by beginning from teachers’ experiences as students, a framing shown to be effective in other contexts, as when encouraging PSTs to make explicit real-world connections to content (Bondurant, 2022).

Interventions which support educators’ shared understanding of these complex social ideas are important, but cannot be the only point of learning for teachers. Teachers and teacher educators alike should recognize that their understanding of what constitutes a community is one of many. This recognition of the variable nature of “community” might support broader efforts to value CCW (Yosso, 2005), welcome community members into school decision-making processes (Maier, et al., 2017), and center community contexts in the mathematics classroom (Aragon, 2018; Civil, 2006).

Making this shift towards a focus on assets is difficult. MTE remains a space where Whiteness pervades teacher understandings of education and community (Battey & Leyva, 2016) and challenges efforts to reframe the field as asset-centered. Activities such as the one presented here are small examples of re-imagining and decolonizing MTE via everyday experiences. Developing a shared understanding of the complex meaning of “community” is an important step as the field responds to the call to organize community teacher development as a domain of inquiry (Gist, 2022).

References

Aragon, A. (2018). Achieving Latina students: Aspirational counterstories and critical reflections on parental community cultural wealth. Journal of Latinos and Education, 17(4), 373-385. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2017.1355804

Battey, D., & Leyva, L. A. (2016). A Framework for understanding Whiteness in Mathematics education. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 9(2), 49-80.

Bezuk, N., Bay-Williams, J., Clements, D. H., Martin, W. G., Aguirre, J., Boerst, T., Burroughs, E. A., Dickey, E., Hughes, E., Huinker, D., Gutierrez, R., Karp, K., Lewis, J., Olson, T. A., Philipp, R., Rigelmann, N., Strutchens, M. E., White, D. Y., & Thomas, C. D. (2017). AMTE standards for mathematics teacher preparation.

Gist, C. D. (2022). The community teacher: How can we radically reimagine power relations in teacher development? Equity & Excellence in Education, 55(4), 342-356.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2022.2137611

Murrell, Jr. P. C. (2001). The Community Teacher: A new framework for effective urban teaching. Teachers College Press.

NCTM Research Committee. (2018). Asset-based approaches to equitable Mathematics education research and practice. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 49(4), 373-389.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of Community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91 https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006