I'm excited to have this piece out. It was a pleasure to have worked with the teacher in this article and I hope her thinking can inform how others think about equity and social justice. The article describes how the teacher, "Harriet", transitioned from (a) "direct instruction" math teaching, to (b) child-centered math teaching with a resistance to "social justice", to (c) seeing some potential value in social justice mathematics.
Looking back at this piece it reminds me of the importance of building relationships as a necessary component (and often precursor to) effecting change. This is hard for me sometimes. I often want to get to it, whether "it" is promoting child-centered math or social justice-oriented math. And sometimes that can be too much all at once. Why should a teacher put themselves out there for me if we don't have a foundation of trust in place first? My partner and colleague Courtney Koestler is outstanding at doing this. She can reach out to teachers, find common ground, start with something small, and over time build up enough trust that she can start to challenge (and be challenged by) teachers. I've seen her do this each place we've lived and it continues to impress me. I tend to need some kind of structure or opportunity to work with teachers.
Finally, I love the quote in the title, "children know more than I think they do." Harriet is referring to children's awareness of social issues, but the quote could just as well be about children's ability to do rich mathematics. People in my line of work often hear things like "these kids could never do that" as a reason for why some students can't engage in rich, child-centered, problem-solving based mathematics. Many people think kids just can't figure things out without being told how (and to be fair our entire educational system is unintentionally set up to teach people this is true). But it turns out that, children know more than we think they do.
About Academic Writing
This paper went through an interesting change. The teacher in this article is very articulate, so the first draft was mostly long (like really long) quotes. It was hard to cut her off when her voice was so clear. Among other things, the reviewers wanted shorter/less quotes, more analysis from me, and a theoretical framework. I ended up kind of stumbled upon zone theory and thought it would work well as a lens for these data
The way articles are often written makes it sound like you start out with some clear framework, use it to inform the research design, collect your data, and then analyze it using your framework. In practice it's almost never like that. Some people try hard to stick to this process, but even then it's messy. But most people I know don't work this way. Frameworks often come after as a new way of looking at or making sense of the data. That's what happened here. Frankly, after the reviewers pushed for a framework, I kind of stumbled upon the one I use in this article (zone theory). And it was exciting. I think it was a good lens for looking at these data and I'm interested to here what others think.
About the Peer Review Process
If you don't know, academic writing is often painful. You put the best you have into a paper and send it off to a journal. It then goes out to three (sometimes more) unknown reviewers (in most cases they don't know who you are either—you have to remove any identifying information from the paper). Mostly they (or at least one of them) tear it to shreds. There are websites devoted to the terrible things they say about your paper.
The reviewers tell the editor if they think (a) the paper should be flat out rejected, (b) you should try to fix it based on their comments and go through this whole process again, or (c) the paper should be accepted with some "minor" changes. Then the editor puts it all together and makes the decision. Option B (called revise and resubmit) is considered a really good outcome the first time through and it often involves making major changes to your paper in an attempt to try to appease an editor and three unknown experts (who may or may not review the next draft and may or may not all agree—hint: the editor is the most important one to appease). There is no guarantee that revise and resubmit will result in a publication (it can come back rejected the second, or third time through). Oh, and did I mention that this process is sloooow? Like, I submitted the original draft of this paper a year and a half ago, it's available online now, and I don't know when it will be physically printed—and this was a relatively straightforward process compared to some.
Now that I'm a bit more established and have tenure, I hope to stick to my goals for papers a bit more. In the past I would often try to make pretty much whatever changes I could just to get things out there. Now I hope to feel more emboldened to push back and say "I just don't think this suggested change makes sense and here's why." Unless, of course, the suggestions are good.
Fortunately, this piece was a relatively straight forward and a positive experience. I think the first draft had some real promise, but it had its weaknesses, and I think it's a stronger and more interesting piece because of the feedback I received. There were some minor changes that I pushed back on—I try to be clear, explain why, and demonstrate that I really considered the comments—but mostly the feedback improved the paper.
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