How teachers attend to and interpret positive relational interactions shapes how they enact instructional practices for equity. We draw on frameworks from equitable mathematics instruction, relational interactions, and teacher noticing to conceptualize mathematics teachers' relational noticing. Using noticing interview and classroom observation data from a research collaborative between secondary mathematics teachers and university-based teacher educators, we document the range and diversity of ten teachers' relational noticing. We use this analysis to examine how teachers' relational noticing supports enacting equitable instructional practices. Our findings indicate five themes of teachers' relational noticing that are informed by their personal histories, understanding of dominant narratives of mathematics education, and their local sociopolitical school context. Additionally, teachers enacted a range of practices for creating positive relational interactions, with attending to student thinking being the most enacted practice. Our findings suggest that mathematics teachers' relational noticing can support the three axes of equitable instruction.

Beginning teachers are challenged to make concrete the identities they envision for themselves in their practice. We examine how a particular context, the noticing interview, supported a novice teacher’s identity work through disciplined awareness to cultivate the inner witness. In a noticing interview, teachers view and discuss video segments from a classroom observation as a way to capture in-the-moment attention and sensemaking. Using the case of a beginning teacher, we found that creating accounts of instructional practice and accounts for instructional decisions helped her connect the dots between her vision of teaching, her personal and social identities, and her pedagogical commitments. These findings have implications for whether and how the noticing interview can become a generative context for teachers developing insights about themselves as noticers in practice and their emerging professional identities. © 2023 ATE and CCNY.

Collaborations between education stakeholders are increasingly prevalent due to the need for diverse perspectives on issues of justice in education. Less is known, however, about how stakeholders form heterogeneous communities where people from different backgrounds learn and take action together. This study examined the contours of a community that emerged from a three-year partnership between mathematics teachers, community educators, and university scholars. This racially- and gender-diverse community was marked by contention and affirmation, which illuminates the complex and politicized nature of the joint work. This study illuminates tensions across dimensions of the community including spaces as affirming and fraught, goals as shared and contested, belonging as ebbing and flowing, relationships as personal and political, and roles as imposed and amorphous.

Efforts to transform educational systems advocate for shifting and expanding the voices of those who generate research. This study was part of a project that brought together mathematics teachers, youth workers, and researchers to create equity-centered noticing frameworks for mathematics instruction. We explore youth workers’ understandings of the relationship between local educational equity problems and larger structural forces. By applying the framework of critical bifocality, we explore how youth workers demonstrate praxis where their pedagogical responses are animated by an understanding of the inherent linkages between broad social, economic, and political forces and educational equity issues in the local community. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

A dominant paradigm for research on teacher professional development has centred teacher learning as created in and through practice. Critical scholars argue for the need to grapple productively with the complexities of teaching in the power-laden contexts of schooling. This involves continual reflection on the ways that teaching reinforces structural inequalities. We articulate the notion of historical self to describe noticing as ground in both personal and social histories that are situated in hierarchies of power and dominant ideologies. We draw on data from a three year, multi-site project that engaged teachers, community members, and researchers in co-developing a noticing for re-humanising framework. Through the narrative of Shannon, a project participant-researcher, we illuminate as part of the historical self: (1) the interconnectedness of both personal and social histories in and through moment-to-moment interactions and their relation to what and how we notice; (2) the vulnerability embedded in rupturing embedded assumptions in these histories, and (3) the importance of understanding what we do not notice, as tied to our privilege.