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A Discourse of Telling and Professional Equity

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Equity in Discourse for Mathematics Education

Part of the book series: Mathematics Education Library ((MELI,volume 55))

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Abstract

I explore the “discourse of telling,” a central dilemma that occurred in each of two synchronous contexts of a professional development project: the classrooms in which the participant teacher-researchers were teaching and the study-group community in which we discussed readings on classroom discourse and the ongoing action research projects. The dilemmas associated with a discourse of telling are related to equity and discourse because authority, control and power are central in decisions about when, how, why and in what ways one might decide to tell. I provide retrospective reflections about how exploring these two different project contexts might have allowed us to examine the discourse of telling in ways that seemed to open up perspectives about the critical dimension of equity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In reference to items written by the teacher–researchers, I use their actual names with their permission to do so. In the transcripts, however, I use pseudonyms in order to maintain some confidentiality about some of the information they shared in the project. When we decided to write the book together, they knew that readers might be able to figure out who they were, but they agreed to contribute to the book anyway.

  2. 2.

    I will use “teacher–researcher” and “university researcher”, in order to distinguish the context in which we primarily worked and not as a way to privilege one over another.

  3. 3.

    Chazan and Ball’s article is an exception to this characterization because they did explore authority issues.

  4. 4.

    For some of our analyses involving authority, control and positioning, see Herbel-Eisenmann (2009), Herbel-Eisenmann et al. (2010), Herbel-Eisenmann and Wagner (2010) and Wagner and Herbel-Eisenmann (2008).

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the teachers for collaborating with us, Michelle Cirillo for her contributions to the work and David Pimm, Dave Wagner and Jeff Choppin for insightful discussions and valuable feedback related to this chapter. This study was supported by an NSF grant (#0347906, Herbel-Eisenmann, PI). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Beth Herbel-Eisenmann

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  1. Beth Herbel-Eisenmann
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Correspondence to Beth Herbel-Eisenmann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Michigan State University, Erickson Hall 329, East Lansing, 48824, Michigan, USA

    Beth Herbel-Eisenmann

  2. , Warner School of Education, University of Rochester, Box 270425, Rochester, 14627, New York, USA

    Jeffrey Choppin

  3. , Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, P.O. Box 4400, Fredericton, E3B 5A3, Canada

    David Wagner

  4. Dept. Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Education South 341, Edmonton, T6G 2G5, Alberta, Canada

    David Pimm

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Herbel-Eisenmann, B. (2012). A Discourse of Telling and Professional Equity. In: Herbel-Eisenmann, B., Choppin, J., Wagner, D., Pimm, D. (eds) Equity in Discourse for Mathematics Education. Mathematics Education Library, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2813-4_10

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