Supporting Prospective Middle School Teachers’ Learning to Revise a High-Level Mathematics Task to Be Culturally Relevant

The student population in the United States is becoming more and more racially and culturally diverse. Specifically, from 2001 to 2011, the proportion of public school enrollment composed of racial and ethnic minority students went from 40 percent to 48 percent and is projected to increase to 55 percent by 2023 (NCES, 2014). Mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) have a responsibility to support prospective teachers (PTs) in learning to teach in ways that afford all students with the best opportunities to learn mathematics for conceptual understanding (e.g., Hiebert, Morris, Berk, & Jansen, 2007; Kazemi, Franke, & Lampert, 2009). However, research has shown that PTs are not adequately prepared to teach racial and ethnic minority students from low-income backgrounds during their teacher education programs (Ladson-Billings, 2000). The knowledge, culture, and experiences of PTs (who tend to be mostly White, middle-to-upper-class females) may be significantly different from those of racial and ethnic minority students in their future classrooms (Dee & Henkin, 2002), for example. This article reports on my efforts, in a middle school mathematics methods course, to implement activities to support PTs in learning about students’ mathematical thinking as well as students’ funds of knowledge—the culturally developed knowledge, skills, and experiences of children in their homes, with their families, and in the community (González et al., 1995; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992)—and using that information to revise a high-level mathematics task to be more culturally relevant for one student who is socio-culturally different from them.