From Getting “Fired” to Becoming a Collaborator: A Case of the Coconstruction of Identity and Engagement in a Project-Based Mathematics Classroom

Abstract

This article investigates the coconstruction of student identity and engagement in the case of a 9th grader in a project-based algebra classroom that afforded students a great deal of autonomy. The focal student, Terrance, utilized classroom resources to serve both project-related and social functions as he interacted with his peers during multiweek projects. As a result, his positioning within his group and patterns of engagement in the mathematics projects shifted dramatically across the academic year. The article ends with a discussion of student autonomy as a potentially powerful feature of hybrid classrooms.

Productive Disruptions: Rethinking the Role of Off-Task Interactions in Collaborative Mathematics Learning

“…This demonstrates that students may be able to find relatively more powerful positions, such as positions of competence through storylines not originating with participating in school tasks [36,40]. Langer-Osuna followed a focal student, Terrance, over an academic year as he constructed positional identities of himself as a learner, starting with a resistant identity and shifting to a productive and engaged identity [26]. To do so, Terrance drew on a variety of school-based and out-of-school-based storylines as he engaged with peers in collaborative learning activities.…”

“…Within mathematics education research, this interactional and negotiated approach to examining identity has been applied to understand several aspects of learning and doing mathematics together in classrooms [13,14,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] (See Figure 3). Studies have traced how particular student identities become possible and enacted through participation in classroom activities.…”

“…While on-task participation draws primarily from storylines about schooling and school mathematics (e.g., what a "good student" looks and sounds like, and so on), off-task participation can draw on a broader range of storylines, including those of friendship and popular culture, potentially making a greater range of positional resources available to students to leverage as they interact with one another and the task [19,26,40]. In this sense, off-task interactions are not simply the lack of directly engaging in the mathematical task, but rather the bringing together of multiple storylines, identities, and relations onto the collaborative activity and, as such, may be drawn into the shared regulation of activity.…”

Connecting the dots: toward a networked framework to conceptualizing identity in mathematics education

“…Indeed, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM 2000), while not explicitly using the term authoring, lists expected authoring-related actions such as developing ideas, exploring phenomena, justifying results, and using mathematical conjectures (p. 56). Recent work has foregrounded taking ownership over meaning making of mathematical ideas as essential to developing an authorial identity (see Fellus and Biton 2018;Grant et al 2015;Landers 2013;Langer-Osuna 2015.…”

Outgoing Editors’ Note: The Journal of the Learning Sciences as a Mirror of Trends in the Field

“…For example, JLS articles in recent years have included studies of racialized and gendered identities in disciplinary learning processes, particularly for marginalized groups (e.g., Archer et al, 2016;DiSalvo, Guzdial, Bruckman, & McKlin, 2014;Langer-Osuna, 2015;Raes, Schellens, & De Wever, 2014). Other articles have focused on learning through participation in social change movements or organizations (e.g., Conner, 2014;Jurow & Shea, 2015) and learning about social inequality and oppression (e.g., Conner, 2014;Esmonde, 2014).…”