Building Community and Relationships that Support Critical Conversations on Race: The Case of Cognitively Guided Instruction

Abstract

The focus of mathematics professional development for elementary teachers has shifted over time. In the case of Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), it started with building a cognitive framework of the development of children’s thinking and carried this cognitive perspective into work with teachers (Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke, 1996). Over the years, some scholars have shifted toward a more situated perspective in working with teachers (Franke, & Kazemi, 2001). The focus of this work has moved from seeing individual teacher change to change in communities, relational identities, and generative growth (Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001; Franke, Kazemi, Shih, Biagetti, & Battey, 2005; Battey & Franke, 2008). More recently we have been searching for a way to build upon our work with school communities to foreground issues of race and equity. We continue our focus on children’s mathematical thinking, but more explicitly address the deficit ideology that can remain despite the amount that has been achieved in this professional development work (Franke 2009; Battey & Franke, 2009). This chapter describes our progression from a focus on students’ mathematical thinking to engaging teachers in grappling with the complexities of race in their classrooms. We leverage critical concepts in our earlier work such as community, relationships, and evidence to explore such conversations with teachers.