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This dissertation is an effort to better understand Black children's conceptions of smartness and the ways that teachers communicate smartness through their practice. Here, I reimagine smartness as a verb rather than a noun--that is, smartness is about what one does that is smart. I develop a conceptual framework that attends to race, mathematics, and teacher practice that disrupts a traditional, white supremacist, and antiBlack mathematics education. Key elements of my conceptual frame incorporate tenets of critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1999) to attend to race. I drew on the mathematical task framework (Stein, Grover, Henningson, 1996) to appraise and analyze the mathematics problems used in the class, and the concept of normative identity (Cobb, Gresalfi, & Hodge, 2009) was a key analytic tool in identifying the obligations and messages communicated by the teacher. I used my conceptual framework to conduct a multi-case study that explores the conceptions of smartness of five Black learners during a summer mathematics program. Additionally, I identified five episodes of instruction that included critical moments that student-participants highlighted as related to their conceptions of smartness. I also then analyzed these episodes to understand what messages about smartness the teacher seemed to be communicating during the program. The data comprise three interviews with each student, pre- and post-surveys, the students' notebooks from the program, and video recordings of classroom instruction. I used these data to answer the research questions: (1) "How do Black students describe what it means to be smart in a summer mathematics program?" and (2) "How does a teacher communicate smartness during a summer mathematics program?" The first part of my findings highlights the number and types of conceptions students have about smartness. The conceptions that I identified are complex and offer three key takeaways: conceptions among students are alike superficially, but different substantively, their conceptions of smartness are malleable, and their conceptions can be seen as strategies that pushback against antiBlackness. The second part of my findings highlights the messages that the teacher communicated about smartness and the methods she used to communicate those messages during the program. The teacher's messages about smartness defined smartness to include characteristics such as "listening to and learning from others' thinking," "revising your own thinking," and "explaining your thinking to convince peers." I also identified six methods the teacher used to communicate these messages: "interrupting normalized patterns of classroom interaction," "scaffolding students to explain their thinking and to orient their explanations to the rest of the class," "encourage students to revise their thinking, using the routines of "notes to self" and end-of-class checks as opportunities to reflect and focus on metacognitive development," "strategically and intentionally acknowledge competence," "designing and using tasks focused on key ideas and practices that challenge and surface multiple ways of thinking." Together these findings raise several implications for future research and practice. Future research should focus on discovering and unpacking the conceptions that Black learners bring into classrooms and how that connects to their enactment of smartness in different contexts. Needed are methods that capture the complexity and dynamism of students' conceptions of smartness, which would allow for understanding the relationship between students' conceptions and their enactments of smartness. From a practice perspective, focusing on the messages about smartness that teachers communicate as well as how they communicate them seems productive. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.] |
