During the COVID-19 pandemic, the approximately 3.2 million teachers serving 50.8 million students in U.S. schools were positioned, along with school counselors, as de facto first responders for student well-being. Teachers across the country, already struggling to transition their teaching to online platforms, had to simultaneously implement recently adopted Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Standards. While prioritizing the social and emotional needs of children is of course a necessity, we wondered about the support needed for teachers who shouldered this work? Of particular interest were the supports for teachers operating in urban schools and with communities of color disproportionately impacted. And within this timeframe, global uprisings protesting police murders of Black bodies revealed the crucial importance of anti-racist educational practices. While we contend that teacher well-being is a key determinate of student well-being, we also explored the ways teachers innovated and created online communities (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to support one another’s SEL and anti-racist pedagogy. The connection between these practices to research-supported online teacher support structures that influence teacher emotions (e.g., efficacy) was further explored. We conclude with implications from learnings from this crisis for practitioners, educator preparation programs, policy, and future research while adding to the limited literature concerning teacher SEL, anti-racism, and teacher-created communities.

The ratio of Asian American teachers to Asian American students is the most disproportionate of all racial groups, where Asian American students are least likely to have an Asian American teacher. In addition, little research focuses on the experiences of Asian American teachers, particularly in connection with issues of racism. Using AsianCrit, internalized racism, and stereotype management, this study investigates how Asian American male mathematics teachers conceptualize their racial/ethnic and mathematics teacher identities given the prevalence of the Model Minority Myth. Using photovoice interviews, findings indicate that participants experienced internalized racism and engaged in stereotype management by distancing themselves from other Asian Americans, discussing their own difficulties in mathematics, and actively reaching out to form relationships with Black and Latinx students. We recommend supports for Asian American teachers and all teachers of color to build critical consciousness to reduce internalized racism and empower themselves and their students.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has opened up conversations in schools across the country about systemic racism, a “new” civil rights movement, and the treatment of children of color. In this article, a veteran elementary teacher uses the #BlackLivesMatter movement to help her students see the power of mathematics in their own lives, taking care to first connect with her school community so as not to incite trauma. Using an age-appropriate activity to investigate the feelings of anger felt by the Black community of Ferguson County, Missouri, shortly before the police murdered Michael Brown, we construct a conversation on what elementary mathematics learning looks like when framed around the guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter. By utilizing and exploring the mathematics behind who gets into Peace Park, children connect various ways of recognizing inequity with mathematical observations, using mathematics as a tool to perceive and confront oppression.

Students with visual impairments (SVIs) are often dehumanized in mathematics education, based on deficit perspectives, the assumption that mathematics learning must be visual, and a lack of tools that allow students on the entire spectrum of vision to collaborate mathematically. The current advent of assistive learning technologies (ALTs) holds promise in helping SVIs learn mathematics, particularly through making mathematics accessible in nonvisual ways. In this critical literature review, two authors, one blind and one sighted, use a disability studies and rehumanizing mathematics education framework to examine currently available ALTs. We organize our findings using the substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition (SAMR) model, then critique the technologies based on their capacity for humanizing SVIs in mathematics learning. We found that most technologies rely on a substitution or augmentation model, merely replacing visual information with audio or tactile information and then requiring SVIs to “act” more like their sighted peers. We found few technologies that recognized the unique mathematical experiences SVIs hold, or empowered SVIs to create and own their own mathematical knowledge through collaboration with all students on the spectrum of vision.

Students’ motivation to learn mathematics often declines during the middle grades. How do we keep students engaged with learning mathematics as it gets more complex? One way is through the use of technology, such as computer games, interactive lessons, or on-line videos. Yet evidence from creating technology-based tasks and resources to motivate students to learn mathematics is mixed, partially because most interventions only loosely incorporate motivational constructs. This article is part of a larger research project examining the impact of three digital resources on students’ motivation and learning in mathematics. In it, we provided resources tightly aligned to motivational constructs from research: self-efficacy, implicit theories of ability, and interest and enjoyment. Students then engaged with these resources before and after a 2-day mathematical patterns lesson. We present results from interviews and observations with eighty-eight fifth- to eighth-grade students and their ten teachers. Findings suggest that, even with a minimal encounter over 1 or 2 days, students were able to notice the motivational constructs present within these digital resources.

Prekindergarten mathematics can be filled with rich, complex mathematical talk that moves beyond traditional counting and cardinality. When paired with issues of fairness, mathematics becomes a social justice tool that empowers prekindergarteners to mathematically recognize and address oppression they see in their own world. We profile the critical mathematics details in two Black history-based activities in which children use mathematics to describe and confront the unfairness they notice within Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman skits. Through these activities, children learn how to communicate and address the unfairness they see using mathematics. We also share instructional considerations and extensions for implementing these activities in the classroom.

Teaching mathematics for understanding requires listening to each student’s mathematical thinking, best elicited in a one-on-one interview. Interviews are difficult to enact in a teacher’s busy schedule, however. In this study, the authors utilize smartphone technology to help mathematics teachers interview a student in a virtual one-on-one setting. Free from physical constraints and preconceived biases, teachers can concentrate on building questioning, listening, and responding skills when noticing student mathematical thinking. Teachers engaged in four communication types when working with students through this technology: clarification, verification, and either extension or redirection.

During the middle school years, students frequently show significant declines in motivation toward school in general and mathematics in particular. One way in which researchers have sought to spark students’ interests and build their sense of competence in mathematics and in STEM more generally is through the use of technology. Yet evidence regarding the motivational effectiveness of this approach is mixed. Here we evaluate the impact of three brief technology-based activities on students’ short-term motivation in math. 16,789 5th to 8th grade students and their teachers in one large school district were randomly assigned to three different technology-based activities, each representing a different framework for motivation and engagement and all designed around an exemplary lesson related to algebraic reasoning. We investigated the relationship between specific technology-based activities that embody various motivational constructs and students’ engagement in mathematics and perceived competence in pursuing STEM careers.

I identify as a Chinese American mathematics teacher educator, in solidarity with the larger social identity of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) teacher educators. My teacher education scholarship revolves around issues of power and privilege. I engage teachers in paying attention to the way race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other social constructs affect their relationships with students. My passion for engaging teachers in these critical conversations comes from personal experiences in which I recall very few teachers engaged in honest conversations about race and power with me. This chapter describes one teacher, Ms. Janice Cummons, who explicitly spoke about issues of power as related to race. Ms. Cummons’s pedagogy significantly impacted my academic journey, leading me to recognize how Whiteness was centered in my own mathematics teaching and then how to critique this racism and privilege.

The Teachers Empowered to Advance Change in Mathematics (TEACH Math) modules can be seen as transformative action, in which pre-service teachers (PSTs) connect issues of equity, agency, and power to student thinking, community knowledge, and classroom practice. Doing this work can be challenging, particularly for PSTs who have never thought about mathematics learning as connected to equity, agency, and power. This chapter offers insight from veteran mathematics teacher educators about activities they have augmented and designed specifically to engage PSTs in starting the critical reflection necessary for engagement in the TEACH Math modules. The activities shared here focus on issues of identity, status, equitable participation, and the rights of the learner using Photovoice interviews, Numbers about Me Posters, Instagram Math Trails, and Mathematics Autobiography Reflections. These individual activities set the stage for PSTs to connect their own experiences with equity, agency, and power to mathematics teaching and learning.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.