In 2018, as a doctoral student researching community-based methodologies and educational advocacy, I frequently wondered about institutional, professional, and interpersonal resources and constraints that people negotiated in collaborative educational work. Particularly, I questioned how our current institutional and professional infrastructures might impact collaboration across differences: in institutions, in communities, and in disciplinary traditions and obligations. It was with this curiosity, but as an outsider to mathematics and mathematics education, that I attended the inaugural GeT A Pencil conference in June 2018. When inviting me to observe the conference, Dr. Herbst and Dr. Brown (neé Milewski) had asked me to think about my participation as ethnographic in nature. In other words, as a relative outsider to the communities, contexts, and knowledge at stake, I could immerse myself in the culture(s) of the conference. In theory, better understanding the milieu of the nascent GeT community could illuminate opportunities and challenges for supporting and sustaining its members’ future collaborative work—particularly work that could meaningfully engage contextual differences and exigencies. 

Preparing for my observation, mentors and colleagues in mathematics education shared some background resources with me. It was through these resources that I was introduced to the nomenclature of “the Math Wars” (Schoenfeld, 2004)—a narrative that, at the time, I understood through the lens of my previous experiences researching educational policy and community activism, in which ideologies are often explicit and oppositional. Given this perspective, I attended the 2018 conference with some notion that the potential differences between stakeholders would be more chasms than gaps. 

Instead, my observations at the conference led me to think about what Lortie (1972) called “the persistence of separation” in educational institutions (p. 15). Disciplines parsed into term-long curricula, classes divided between teachers and conducted in contained spaces, and few institutional resources to support sustained collaboration are all, at least in some ways, symptomatic of the “cellular” structure (p. 13) of educational institutions and professions—including teaching being located in the cellular unit of the classroom. Ultimately, Lortie argued, the persistence of separation across the infrastructure and professional work of education has become an entrenched feedback loop, limiting opportunities for substantive, systemic change and development. While Lortie’s analysis was particularly focused on teaching in the context of public K-12 schools, his work pointed to the complexities and possibilities of using an ecological perspective to engage questions about professional development and curricular change. Critically, such complexities and possibilities include dually attending to (a) the dynamic relationships and connections between people and their institutional, disciplinary, and community contexts and (b) the systemic relationships and connections between these various contexts. 

Through my observations over the course of the 2018 GeT conference, I started to assemble a more nuanced understanding of and appreciation for the tensions that so many GeT instructors seemed to be navigating in their work—both within their individual contexts and across their shared contexts. Many attendees averred their multiple professional obligations as GeT instructors: to pre-service mathematics teachers, to mathematics students, to their departments and institutions, to the beauty and rigor of mathematics. Many spoke with passion and vehemence about their students’ needs, their curricular scope, and the relative value of MKT items for supporting their work. In the context of group discussion of GeT course and instructor tensions, I noted some qualities of those tensions, including tensions about capacity (time, instructor load, curricular priorities); tensions about knowledge (instructor knowledge, high school teacher knowledge, knowledge hierarchies within institutional contexts, knowledge credentialing); and tensions about the disconnection involved with GeT instruction (the variability in geometry preparation within teacher education programs, the isolated nature of GeT instruction and course design, the absence of articulation between education and mathematics departments). On the final day of the conference, one attendee alluded to their concern that the gap between geometry as a mathematical discipline and geometry as an object of K-12 educational policy could present an existential dilemma to potential collaborative efforts within the GeT community in the future.

When sharing my post-conference reflections with the GRIP Lab in 2018, I recall feeling sensitive to how variable people’s experiences may have been of the conference—and particularly of the conference’s substantive focus on examining tensions related to institutions, students, instructors, knowledge, and experiences. My sensitivity did not presume that such variability was inauspicious for the development of the GeT community. As Bryk (2015) detailed in his model of networked improvement communities, variability of contexts and people’s relationships to those contexts is unavoidable and certainly not inherently negative. Instead, Bryk explained, for educators and researchers desiring sustainable “improvement” (i.e., more accessible GeT course resources), inquiring about how “various work processes, tools, role relationships, and norms [can] interact more productively under a variety of conditions” (2014, p. 473, emphasis original). This perspective connects with some of my larger wonderings about the emerging culture of the GeT community. Born (2014) posited that all people relate to community in one of three main ways: turning away from others, turning against others, and turning toward others (p. 15-16). According to his framework, the quality of a community corresponds to its members’ modes of engagement: when people turn away from others, shallow communities are formed; when people turn against one another, fear-based communities are formed; when people turn toward one another, deep communities are formed. In terms of this framework, only one option would undergird a story about the GeT community engaging tensions in a way that challenged the persistence of separation in education; the other two would simply reinforce and exacerbate such separation. From the ecological perspective of educational systems, a key question that I (and perhaps others) had was: What dynamic contexts and relationships facilitate and sustain people in the GeT community in turning toward one another? 

This is one of the questions I have asked while familiarizing myself with the GeT working community—including members’ current and past activities—over the past four months. I think there is good reason to believe that the work of the GeT community—members’ continued participation, leadership, reporting, and visioning—is a live-action answer to that question. In conversation with physics professor Arthur Zanjoc, educational philosopher Parker Palmer (2010) named the correspondence between qualities contributing to integrity in scholarship and qualities contributing to integrity in community. Palmer wrote, “Those of us who understand inquiry, for whom it is a way of being in the world, can use our understanding to reach across gaps, ask each other questions that matter, listen with care, and find our way toward personal and communal action” (p. 133). Collaborative inquiry is a way of turning toward one another in our efforts to know and reckon with our personal and collective realities. I have witnessed evidence of this kind of inquiry in the GeT working groups, instances when people neither abandoned their individual contexts and obligations nor imposed those contexts and obligations as requisite premises for their engagement.

In the Transformations working group, I have observed GeT members engaging questions of instruction and design, including thinking together about various possibilities for engaging students in learning geometry and learning about the teaching of geometry. In one group meeting, members shared information about the people in their GeT courses and the connections they identified between their student populations and their selection and use of course materials, including textbooks. In another meeting, members of this group discussed technology tools in geometry instruction. In doing so, they telescoped between large social contexts (e.g. how the pandemic has influenced our use of technology in teaching and learning) and individual use cases related to particular mathematical tasks (e.g. designing and platforming the Adinkra lesson).

In the Teaching GeT working group, I have observed robust engagement around issues related to building professional resources for instructors of GeT courses (and particularly those for whom GeT is a new course in their teaching load). In one Teaching GeT meeting, I listened to community members share with one another about how GeT articulated with other coursework in their programs and how considering student learning objectives (SLOs) in GeT involved their thinking across their own institutional contexts and curricula. GeT members participating in the SLO item assessment workshop also often demonstrated their desire to think across their own personal context (i.e., How would this item work with my students?) and contexts representing more generalized tensions facing many GeT instructors (i.e., How would this item work with pre-service teachers and mathematics majors in the same course?).

I joined the GeT project with an understanding of the GRIP Lab team’s interest in better understanding how GeT instructors share and build knowledge vis-a-vis geometry and geometry teaching. However, it has been the perseverance of the GeT community—people continuing to show up and engage with the messy realities and complexities of the ecology of GeT—that has been the most re-orienting for my own understanding of how communities of inquiry can constructively confront the persistence of separation and its attendant feedback loop between institutions and the professional work that occurs within them. I hope that, moving forward, I can learn more from all of you in the GeT community about your opinions, experiences, and insights and that we can continue to explore together the ecological implications of our collective involvement.