Dr. Frances Harper, TPTE Director of Diversity and Inclusion and Associate Professor, STEM Education/Math in the College of Health, Education, and Human Sciences department of Theory & Practice in Teacher Education, began her career as a classroom teacher herself. She worked as a PreK-12 educator for 9 years before transitioning into teacher education.
Although she has taught various subject areas, Dr. Harper shares that she “was always most passionate about teaching mathematics. But not because I love mathematics the most.” As a first-generation college student, mathematics opened many doors for Dr. Harper, but as a teacher, she shares that she could see how mathematics “limited opportunities for many students in ways that other subjects did not.” Given the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper for academic and career opportunities, Dr. Harper was determined to find ways to support students who are typically marginalized in and by mathematics.
After earning two master’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford related to mathematics education and reflecting on the experiences of her students, Dr. Harper realized that “the impact of a single teacher on the inequities in mathematics was limited.” For those reasons, she entered the doctoral program in mathematics education at Michigan State University with a strong commitment to “advancing equity and social justice in and through mathematics as a researcher and teacher educator.”
As she launched her career in higher education, Dr. Harper looked for a place where she could continue to advance equity and justice in mathematics education with prospective and practicing teachers. She shares that what ultimately drew her to UT were the teacher education programs within her department that were designed around the vision of advancing equity through excellence in education: UT’s vision of “Volunteer Spirit.” This Volunteer spirit, characterized in Dr. Harper’s words by a “passion for promoting social change through conscientious service and leadership,” aligned with her own personal commitments to promoting change in mathematics education. Now, firmly in her role within the department of Theory & Practice in Teacher Education, Dr. Harper still aims to embody the Volunteer Spirit by “listening to and learning from the diverse perspectives of community partners to support and co-lead collaborative efforts that truly benefit communities to advance racial, linguistic, and social justice in education.”
When asked about the development and practice of her teaching philosophy, Dr. Harper shared with us a quote by bell hooks:
“One of the things that we must do as teachers is twirl around and around, and find out what works with the situation that we’re in. Our models might not work. And that twirling, changing, is part of the empowerment.”
“For me,” shares Dr. Harper, this twirling imagery “highlights the most invigorating aspect of teaching – the need to grow and adapt to ever-changing situations.” That quote also captures the two central tenets that guide Dr. Harper’s own teaching philosophy: teaching is highly contextualized and as such, requires adaptation; and teaching is about taking risks, which empower both teacher and students. Dr. Harper’s research has explored these two ideas and further enforced them through her own personal practices in the classrooms—both as a teacher and with her students.
“When I say that ‘teaching is highly contextualized and as such, requires adaption,’” Dr. Harper starts, “what I mean to say is that teaching cannot be generalized for all students. It must be contextualized in order to support each individual learner.” She believes that framing teaching as a collection of “best practices” for all students “oversimplifies teaching and learning and maintains a focus on those students already well served by the status quo in educational systems.” Dr. Harper then points out that “research shows that person-centered instruction benefits students both academically and affectively. A meta-analysis of around 1000 articles found that person-centered teaching was highly correlated with students’ critical and creative thinking, basic learning, engagement, and motivation (Cornelius-White, 2007).” Accordingly, Dr. Harper has adopted the following three practices in her classroom: Prioritizing relationships as the foundation for contextualizing teaching; contextualizing course experiences in relation to other community experiences; and adapting course experiences to meet evolving student needs.
Of course, as our world evolves, so do the needs of students and the climate of the classroom. As Dr. Harper puts it, “Teaching is about taking risks, which empowers us as much as our students.” These risks come from the experiences Dr. Harper creates for students “to reflect and act on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of their world.”
Dr. Harper does realize that opening space for “controversial topics and questions without a clear answer is risky, especially in a discipline, such as mathematics, where the teacher is commonly positioned as the authority and the content assumed politically neutral.” However, this does not deter her. “For me,” states Dr Harper, “taking that risk is more important than teaching towards particular learning objectives.” Asking students to question previously held ideas, or to “unlearn in order to learn,” may cause some students to feel uncomfortable in the classroom. “The more attached students are to previously held ideas, the more uncomfortable they feel as they imagine new possibilities,” she states. “However, when teachers and students are willing to tackle those problems together, both the students and the teacher learn and grow, making the teaching and learning process an empowering experience for all involved.” Dr. Harper can think of two risks that have played an essential role in the development of her teaching: “questioning previously held ideas to imagine new possibilities for knowing, doing, and teaching mathematics; who and what mathematics is for; and educational research and scholarship; as well as the second risk of using evaluation strategies that empower students to take ownership of learning.”
When asked about where she has seen these aspects of her teaching philosophy play out in her classroom, Dr. Harper shares some powerful examples. She begins by describing how, “in teaching mathematics education, contextualizing individual experiences means meeting prospective teachers where they are in their thinking about mathematics teaching and learning.” Dr. Harper can reflect now on when she started as a faculty member new to the university, and how her “lack of familiarity with the social context and academic programs of my students created challenges, especially considering that I teach prospective teachers across multiple programs.” Her limited familiarity with students’ contexts left some students feeling like the course didn’t “blend well with others they’d taken here” or “seemed irrelevant at times.”
To address this, Dr. Harper began explicitly prioritizing relationship building to learn about students’ experiences in their academic programs and teaching internships and used these experiences to make decisions and adaptions in her classroom more transparent so as not to cause frustration.
“Largely, students valued this approach, and have increasingly described shared power in the class and feeling validated and supported,” she says. “This became even more critical during the transition to remote learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic.” For example, this feedback from a student in Spring 2020 highlights the effectiveness of all three core teaching practices Dr. Harper implements in the classroom:
“Dr. Harper transitioned to online teaching amazingly. She showed that she cared about us and gave us a space to talk before we began learning. Also, she modified course expectations to reflect the new situation. She did not lower expectations, but she also made it clear she understood this was an unprecedented time. I am SO thankful that she decided to make asynchronous work and keep the zoom meetings to an hour.”
While she does appreciate how contextualizing learning and prioritizing relationships has improved her classroom environment, Dr. Harper is quick to admit that it “does not alleviate the discomfort of questioning long-held views about mathematics teaching and learning.” She explains how many prospective teachers initially believe that “explaining mathematics well will ensure all students can solve procedural problems correctly,” but cautions her students against holding onto such beliefs. “Simply offering better explanations of procedural mathematics does little to support the mathematics learning of PreK-12 students who are not well served by the status quo in mathematics education,” explains Dr. Harper. “That is why my mathematics teacher educator practice aims to guide prospective teachers to imagine new possibilities for mathematics teaching and learning. I ask prospective teachers to critically examine their own experiences as students, the mathematics teaching they observe in their practicum experiences, and their vision for mathematics education by questioning what mathematics is, who mathematics is for, and what purposes mathematics can serve.”
Dr. Harper also infuses her courses and their guiding principles with a sociopolitical perspective. These principles guide the risks that she took in her own teaching, including the decision to take a risk on her first day of teaching at UT in 2017.
“Only weeks before my first UT class began, the events that unfolded around the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA rocked and divided the nation,” recalls Dr. Harper. Several professional organizations in education released official responses to the events, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). NCTM’s statement emphasized the impact of such events on K-12 students and encouraged teachers of mathematics to envision the possibilities of using mathematics as “an analytic tool to challenge power, privilege, and oppression.”
“When I began designing my courses,” Dr. Harper reflects,“I took these ideas into consideration and sought ways to remain true to my goals to teach from a sociopolitical perspective in the context of UT teacher education. I still took the risk of making these perspectives explicit to prospective teachers, but I framed the conversation differently. Namely, I framed the class discussion around the questions: What mathematics? For whom? For what purposes? This framing still allowed me to bring up issues of racial injustice, but in a way that was more related to the prospective teachers.”
Since then, Dr. Harper has continued to build upon these foundations, to both take risks and adapt to changing contexts. This guiding philosophy has pushed her to “reimagine not only course content but also how the courses themselves are structured.” Most recently, Dr. Harper shares, she has sought to do the following: “disrupt how grades shift the focus away from learning by modeling standards-based and ‘gradeless’ approaches; and center community engagement so prospective teachers learn to leverage the mathematical assets of Black and Latinx communities in their instruction; and respond to the unique needs of students during and following a global pandemic.”
The effectiveness of her person-centered and humanizing teaching has been recognized by Dr. Harper’s colleagues within the department (2020 Teaching Award), the college (2020 Lura Odland Excellence Award), the university (2023 Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award), and her profession (2020 AMTE NTLI Award).
“More personally,” Dr. Harper shares, “students sometimes describe my teaching, as a ‘really different teaching style’ that ‘kept the course engaging,’ which is the most rewarding acknowledgement.” Yet, Dr. Harper continues to seek ways to get input from her students to better understand how to meet them where they are in their thinking about mathematics teaching and learning within the broader social and political climate of schools, the community, the state, and the nation. By continuing to take risks in her teaching, Dr. Harper says she feels “empowered to adapt my teaching in ways that best serve me and my students’ growth as people committed to realizing a more socially just world.”
When asked to share her thoughts around the future of higher education, Dr. Harper offers the following vision:
“Current and future university students have unique educational experiences that university faculty must recognize and respond to appropriately. The next decade of incoming students will have experienced some form of disruption to their PreK-12 education during a global pandemic. Their K-12 educational experience may also be characterized by turmoil in other ways, given sweeping teacher shortages and the polarizing views (re)shaping curriculum and instruction. As we navigate this landscape, I expect teaching to feel increasingly risky for faculty. Thus, universities need to evolve to prioritize the emotional wellbeing of both students and their instructors. Person-centered and humanizing pedagogies provide one way for faculty to adapt their individual instruction, but institutional change is necessary to ensure healthy teaching and learning environments.”