[RSCT] New PME Working Group

[Tonya Gau Bartell]

Dear Colleague- 

We are writing to invite you to participate in a new PMENA working group, Addressing Equity and Diversity Issues in Mathematics Education, this coming September in Atlanta. We are hoping to bring together a community of people committed to working together to further both theory and methods for research related to these issues.   
We believe your participation will contribute to the success of this working group. We hope you can join us in Atlanta. Please forward to other colleagues you feel would be interested. Further information about the working group follows. 

Thank you, 

Anita Wager, Ann R. Edwards, Mary Q. Foote, Tonya G. Bartell 

The overarching goal of the working group on Addressing Equity and Diversity Issues in Mathematics Education is to facilitate collaboration within the growing community of scholars and practitioners concerned with understanding and addressing the challenges of attending to issues of equity and diversity in mathematics education. Under the umbrella of attending to equity and diversity issues in mathematics education, researchers are currently focusing on such issues as teaching and classroom interactions, Professional Development, pre-service teacher education (primarily in   
Math Methods classes), student learning (including the learning of particular sub-groups of students such as African-American students or English learners), and parent perspectives. Much of the work attempts to contextualize the teaching and learning of mathematics within the local contexts in which it happens, as well as to examine the   
structures within which this teaching and learning occurs (e.g. large urban, suburban, or rural districts; under-resourced or well-resourced schools; and high-stakes testing environments). How the greater contexts and policies at the national, state, and district level impact the teaching and learning of mathematics at specific local sites is an important issue, as is how issues of culture, race, and   
power intersect with issues of student achievement and learning in mathematics. 

The Working Group will provide a forum for these scholars to come together with other interested researchers who identify their work as attending to equity and diversity issues within mathematics education in order to develop plans for future research. Our main goal for this year is to begin a sustained collaboration around key issues (theoretical and methodological) related to research design and analysis in studies attending to issues of equity and diversity in mathematics education. In order to support this collaborative research, smaller research groups will be formed from participants in the large Working Group. These groups will be dependent on the research interests of the Working Group participants. For example, a smaller group may discuss research on in-service teachers engaged in Professional Development, or research done within the context of a Mathematics Methods course.