I graduated from Occidental College in 2013 with a B.A. in Urban and Environmental Policy and a Mathematics Minor. After graduating, I enrolled in an alternative-teaching certification program, Nashville Teaching Fellows (NTF). At the time, I was ignorant to the history of education in the United States and NTF’s privatization of public schools agenda. The summer after my first two years as a high school mathematics teacher, I found myself without a teaching license after failing the NTF program due to my students’ test scores.
My experience with NTF motivated me to learn more about the seemingly invisible political structures and machines that churned out teachers from programs like NTF and that influenced the education system. How is it possible that someone like me – an inexperienced, ignorant, naively well-intentioned young person (22 yrs old) – was allowed to teach in a public school for two years?
I also craved an understanding of the teaching and learning of mathematics, the privatization and corporatization of public schools, the history of U.S. education, and the consequences of zero-tolerance policies and classroom management techniques that programs like NTF bathe themselves in. What are the power implications of behavior management systems like SLANT (Sit Up, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, Track the speaker), which seek to control the minds and bodies of black and brown children? What, specifically, is uncommon about the Uncommon Schools charter network (i.e., what is “common”)? How does individualism relate to current education reform trends? Are teachers professionals, members of the proletariat class, intellectuals? Who are we? And then, how does all of this relate to mathematics and logic in and of itself? How are logic and mathematics used to promote certain educational agendas?
This website will be used to share my ideas as a (re-)emerging mathematics educator, as well as to discuss the projects that I am working on.
I am currently a Bay Area resident, pursuing my Masters and Credential in Mathematics and Science Education at U.C. Berkeley. I will graduate in May 2018 and will enter my third year of teaching in the 2018-2019 school year.
If you are interested in the things that I am interested in, I hope you reach out to me.
Contact: elizabeth_dutton@berkeley.edu