Teachers are called to be teachers. They are not called for money or for fame, but an unshakeable desire to care for children. To love them.

Mathematics teacher educators are called to move in the field toward promoting and enacting more equitable practice in our methods classroom that supports equitable practice in the mathematics classroom. This can be seen in the various position statements being disseminated by professional organizations associated with mathematics education (AMTE, PME-NA, NCTM, TODOS, etc.).

In combination, this call to love and call toward equity speaks to a better way of loving through teaching, but how to promote that sort of practice through the work of a mathematics methods instructor?

At the the annual conference of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators in Phoenix, AZ, my colleagues and I had the opportunity to share our perspective on teaching mathematics methods as agape. In addition, we discussed the need for the disposition of critical grace in doing this work. We shared our working definition of Critical Grace and how we imagine its importance in both what we do as mathematics methods instructors and for the field at large.

Amidon, J., Marshall, A. M., & Smith, R.(February, 2020). Grace in Learning: A Necessary Condition of Equitable Practices in the Mathematics Classroom. Session at annual conference of the Association for Mathematics Teacher Educators. Phoenix, AZ.

Link to the Slides

Photo by Tobias Mrzyk on Unsplash