This article explores the work of two African American mathematics teachers, Madison Morgan and Floyd Lee, for the purposes of illuminating our collective understanding of the resources and perspectives African American teachers may access in the context of the teaching and learning of mathematics. Through the use of dimensions of students’ mathematics identity development and teachers’ socialization practices as analytic frames, we present an analysis of aspects of the two teachers’ perspectives on teaching mathematics and classroom practices and discuss considerations when approaching conducting research on interactions between African American mathematics teachers and their African American students. We conclude this article with a framework through which we might consider the work of all mathematics teachers as they engage in the work of socializing their students toward (or away from) seeing themselves as competent, capable mathematics learners.
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The following story is very instructive about the sort of people in the Wikipedia universe, and what sort of people actually run things on the sixth most popular website online.
In case you didn’t know, there is an organization, Wikimedia UK, that is legally independent of the Wikimedia Foundation headquartered in San Francisco. Wikimedia UK has a separate budget of £1 million, and is currently headed up by someone who calls himself “Fae” (among many others) on Wikipedia, and whose real name is Ashley Van Haeften.
Van Haeften is a charming character. Among his many exploits, he is reputed to have posted pornographic pictures of himself in bondage gear to Wikimedia Commons, although any evidence has by now been deleted, so we now have only copies like this. While he has been a high-profile administrator on Wikipedia, he routinely lobbed personal attacks at those who dared to criticize him. And much else.
So the High Court of Wikipedia, the Arbitration Committee, declared on July 20: “For numerous violations of Wikipedia’s norms and policies, Fæ is indefinitely banned from the English Language Wikipedia. He may request reconsideration of the ban six months after the enactment of this remedy, and every six months thereafter.”
In other words, Van Haeften, the head of a £1 million charity devoted to the promotion of Wikipedia, has been banned from Wikipedia itself, and for violating Wikipedia’s own policies!
Now that is, I’m sure you’ll agree, just appalling. It speaks volumes about the Wikipedia community at present that Van Haeften attained the position he holds. But it gets even worse.
On July 26, Wikimedia UK held a closed-door meeting in which the Board declared that they are “united in the view that this decision does not affect his [Van Haeften's] role as a Trustee of the charity.”
In other words, the board that manages a £1 million budget, devoted to promoting Wikipedia, supports its chair even if the chair has been banned from editing Wikipedia itself. One has to wonder: how can the Wikimedia UK Board pretend that Van Haeften can continue to be a credible chair of a well-funded Wikipedia charity if the judicial body of Wikipedia has deliberately excluded him from the website for violating Wikipedia’s own policies?
It is a stunning revelation of just how huge a pass the mainstream media has given Wikipedia that this story was nowhere to be heard, outside of online forums and blogs, until this morning. Eleven days after Van Haeften, head of Britain’s £1 million Wikipedia charity, was banned from Wikipedia, and five days after he was unaccountably supported by Wikimedia UK, a single story came out in the mainstream media.
This morning, the Daily Telegraph came out with a pitch-perfect and (as far as I can tell) factually accurate report:
Ashley Van Haeften is chairman of Wikimedia UK, a charity with an £1m annual budget funded by donations by Wikipedia visitors and dedicated to promoting the website among British museums and universities.
Despite his volunteer role at the head of the charity he is now banned indefinitely from contributing to Wikipedia because of “numerous violations of Wikipedia’s norms and policies”.
Mr van Haeften’s punishment exposes a deep rift among Wikipedia contributors over the mass of explicit material in the online encyclopaedia, at a time when the Government is developing new controls on internet access to protect children online.
The story goes on to discuss Wikipedia’s problem of unfiltered porn, readily available to the school children who use it, and includes my YouTube video about the problem, and the following quote from yours truly: “Some things are worth going to the mat over and this is one of them. It goes to the sense of seriousness of the whole project. Wikipedia can’t command respect if it regards itself as above the norms of wider society.” The story was also followed up by an excellent report in CivilSociety.co.uk. (Update: And on August 1, FoxNews.com.)
I hope the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is paying attention. They will lose credibility by being associated with Wikimedia UK (WMUK). They should not allow Wikimedia UK to use Wikipedia.org for any further fundraising. Nor should WMF cooperate with WMUK in any other way. The WMF should also release a statement condemning WMUK’s recent action. They should continue this non-cooperation until the WMUK Board has been replaced. If the WMF continues to act as if nothing has happened, they will become complicit in the appalling behavior of Ashley Van Haeften and his colleagues on the WMUK Board who supported him.
If Van Haeften had any decency, he would have resigned on July 20. If the WMUK Board had any sense, they would have fired him as soon as Van Haeften made his defiance clear.
By the way, if you want to get into the sordid details, some places to start are this long Wikipediocracy thread and this Wikipedia Review thread. Frankly, I haven’t read much of either one.
This story’s front page thumbnail is from a screen capture of this Google Images search–note, the fifth search result for the image search is taken from this article. (Update: that search is made when SafeSearch is “off.” As it turns out, Google’s optional filter excises Van Haeften’s self-pornography.)
UPDATE (8/2/2012): Van Haeften has finally resigned.
This article offers a case study of the practice of one well-respected African American algebra teacher in an urban high school. This teacher’s practice differs from that of many of her colleagues in its departure from the pacing and order of the district curriculum guide in search of an experience of coherence and meaning for her students. The article explores her reasons for making such decisions and the beliefs and knowledge that allow her to do so; some of her beliefs and motives seem to be rooted in her own experiences as an African American student, experiences that serve as a resource in her teaching.
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This article focuses on a well-respected young Black male algebra teacher in an urban high school whose practice differs from that of many of his colleagues in one regular feature of classroom interaction, what the authors have come to call “speeches.” This article lays out examples of the speeches and, using themes from the literature on culturally relevant classroom management, illustrates how these themes are regularly present throughout the speeches and capture the stance this teacher takes in his interactions with students. The cultural resources that this young teacher brings to his practice challenge educational researchers to conceptualize the role of such resources in teaching and teacher educators to consider the recruitment of teachers who have such resources, as well as how to teach prospective teachers to develop and utilize such resources in their teaching.
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This article outlines the research questions that organize the two cases that are at the heart of this special issue, introduces the theoretical perspectives behind the project from which the cases are drawn, and describes the selection procedures for the data corpus from which the articles in the issue were developed. It also explains the interrelationships among the six pieces in the issue. In doing so, the article problematizes contemporary discourse about urban education and presents an argument for what might be learned from the practices of well-respected African American teachers of high school mathematics in large, nonselective urban schools.
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Since everybody and his grandma have gotten on the Internet in a big way in the last few years, the social influence of giant Internet companies has skyrocketed. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon, Twitter, and many more wield enormous power over us.
We have given them that power. Their success is built on participation, and we willingly participate.
For those of us who have watched the Internet grow from the time we had to dial in to local bulletin boards, or log onto big mainframes, these are somewhat troubling developments. Facebook makes decisions that are deeply consequential to all of us, but without consulting us. They violate our privacy expectations and too readily share our information with people who might abuse it. Another example is Wikipedia. People who find lies about themselves on Wikipedia pages, who otherwise might have recourse to libel law, are often forced to participate in an arcane and often unfair system. Wikipedia also lacks any filter for their enormous porn holdings, while its representatives continue to tout it as a great resource for school children.
I could go on, but this is not just about Facebook or Wikipedia, or any one website. This is about participatory Internet companies that are so huge that their users–and the broader public affected by them–essentially have no meaningful input in their governance. But shouldn’t they? We live in a democratic age. If we participate in a community, we expect to have a say in how that community operates; the community becomes, in a real sense, ours.
The patriots of the American Revolution said, “No taxation without representation.” Now, participation and use are not exactly taxes, but they are obviously very valuable to Internet companies, and those companies are now in a position to abuse what is so freely given to them. Why shouldn’t we say: no participation without representation!
I don’t propose an online revolution. These are issues that must not be left in the hands of the state, wielding “the blunt instrument of the law.” If the state were to address these issues, it would be making itself into an editor, and the state cannot edit without censorship. Rather, these issues should be left in the hands of civil society–in free associations of free people.
But civil society lacks effective institutions and mechanisms to deal with these problems. Let me propose one: Internet user unions.
In the 19th century, when economic influence consolidated in the hands of factory owners, the union movement sought to give a voice to workers who, individually, had no way to negotiate with their employers.
In the 21st century, we find social influence consolidating in the hands of website owners. Shouldn’t there be corresponding unions of Internet users to negotiate with the websites that they participate in and use?
A Facebook User Union might call Facebook executives to the negotiating table about any significant changes to policy, or else face days of boycotts. That union’s nuclear option would be, after an open, transparent process, to recommend that masses of users abandon Facebook for any number of competitors.
A Wikipedia User Union might represent the voices of Wikipedia’s users, which have never been represented within Wikipedia’s insular decisionmaking processes. They might influence Wikipedia to install a porn filter–or to admit that they have an “adult” website.
In addition to unions for participating websites, there could be unions for special issues. There might be an Internet User Union of Families, which represents the interests of children online. There could be scholarly unions, which blow the whistle on media companies and others online, who get facts wrong and who organize their users’ collective influence to engage in their essential role of teaching. There could even be, simply, an Internet User Union, although they would have to think hard about what their goals are, precisely.
But let’s be careful about what we wish for. These would be inherently political organizations. The consequences, at least in some cases, could be as troubling as companies acting on behalf of users without adequate user input. One can imagine a “rogue” union–like Anonymous, but bigger–coordinating cyber-attacks. One can also imagine openly political unions that use their influence to flood ideological opponents’ forums with hostile comments.
To my mind, however, the best effect that Internet User Unions might have is to organize people to build things that are useful to everyone. I have been thinking about the enormous untapped potential of people working together online since before I spearheaded Wikipedia in 2001. The Big Problem, not really solved by Wikipedia itself, is getting enormous numbers of people to agree upon a well-designed system. Wikipedia would be dwarfed by a system that I imagine is really possible, one that is appealing to a much broader cross-section of the public than Wikipedia itself is. An Internet User Union might develop the idea for such an organization, launch it with many thousands of people ready and raring to go, as well as find enough funding to keep it independent and non-profit.
If you’re interested in this idea, let’s start talking about the philosophical, social, and broadly technical issues. This is something new. We do not want to go off half-cocked.
Last Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation board quietly voted, in person, 10-0 in favor of repealing the “personal image hiding feature”–in other words, a very weak, opt-in porn filter. “Quietly,” I say, because the resolution was not posted publicly until the middle of the weekend. Note that the page mistakenly states that Jimmy Wales voted against it: “That page is wrong,” Wales clarified on his user talk page, “I voted yes.”
This is certainly news. A brief recap of some related events will help put it in essential context. (Here’s another recap.) You may not know that funding for the early years of Wikipedia came from Bomis, Inc., which made much of its money from what Wikipedians have called “softcore porn.” I’ve always said that Bomis was the fertilizer on which Wikipedia was built. Jimmy Wales was CEO and one of the three partners of Bomis. I started Wikipedia for Bomis, which paid my paycheck. Anyway, I’m not sure when Wikipedia first started hosting what most people would call porn, but it may have been around 2003. Over the years, there have been many proposals to rein in or filter the “adult content,” all of which have failed. In March 2008, Erik Moeller, who had recently been appointed Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), came under heavy fire for what Mashable called “his continued self-defense of statements generally indicating that pedophilia is something that’s less than evil.” Moeller continues to hold the post. In December, 2008, Wikipedia was temporarily blacklisted by the British Internet watchdog, the Internet Watch Foundation, for hosting “images of child pornography.” The site continues to host the offending image, as well–an album cover feature a nude, and very sexualized, picture of a pre-pubescent girl.
Things really began to heat up in 2010. In March, I reported the WMF to the FBI because they hosted graphic depictions of child sexual molestation on Wikimedia Commons–and they still do. At the time, I also strongly urged the WMF to install a pornography filter. In the fallout, Wales and others started purging porn from Commons, but Wikipedians summarily swatted down the erstwhile “God-King” and reinstated much of the porn that had been deleted. There was also ongoing concern about Wikipedia’s pedophilia problem. In reaction, the WMF commissioned a report, which recommended installing an opt-in porn filter. In May, 2011, the WMF unanimously approved a “personal image hiding feature.” Matters were far from settled, however. In September, 2011, Wikipedians came out strongly in favor of allowing minors to edit pornography articles right alongside adults, and the German Wikipedians voted 86% against even a weak, opt-in a porn filter.
In March of 2012, Board members dropped hints that work had stopped on the filter and that they, like others, no longer supported it. I began conferring with some colleagues about what to do; I had been largely silent on the issue since the WMF demonstrated some commitment to tackle it responsibly. I was surprised to learn that the amount of “adult” content on Wikimedia servers had grown substantially since 2010. With the help of those colleagues I carefully wrote and posted this explanation of the problem, which got quite a bit of exposure. As I put it via Twitter: “Wikipedia, choose two: (1) call yourself kid-friendly; (2) host lots of porn; (3) be filter-free.” Jimmy Wales responded via Twitter, stating clearly and unequivocally that he supported the filter. My impression is that members of the public who recently commented on the issue online have been overwhelmingly supportive, many expressing surprise and even shock at the amount of “adult” content that Wikipedia hosts. This video of mine may help clarify the trouble.
That takes us up to today. On the issue of a weak, opt-in filter, the WMF perfectly reversed itself, going from unanimous support to unanimous rejection. “Unanimous” rejection assumes that Jimmy Wales voted yes on Wednesday’s resolution, as he said on his Wikipedia user talk page, and contrary to what the resolution page says, as of this writing. He has further clarified (if that is the right word) that, despite his apparent “yes” vote for Wednesday’s resolution, he continues to “strongly support the creation of a personal image filter.” If I were cynical, I would say that he and the WMF had deliberately left his views unclear, so that he could speak out of both sides of his mouth. Anyway, if he still strongly supports the creation of a “personal image filter,” voting to rescind the resolution that would create the filter is a mighty strange way to show his support.
However matters are, the filter is now officially and overwhelmingly rejected. Unless they make another 180° change and actually get to work, publicly, on a filter, I believe a boycott may well be in order.
UPDATE: Jimmy Wales is now hosting a discussion (talk) of how the filter should be written. Let’s see if anything constructive comes out of it.
This article reviews political science theories and findings to inform our understanding of how politics affects efforts to increase data usage in education policy and school reform. Rather than block the door to politics, those who hope to promote informed policy making might consider ways to use politics to protect and defend high-quality data.
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This article offers that many data use studies suggest that the interpretation and use of data take place both within and between individuals who, through social interaction, are both co-constructing and making sense of data and their use. Given the increasing important role of social relationships in data use studies, better theorizing and deeper understanding regarding the dynamics of social influence and processes on the interpretation and use of data are needed. Social network theory and analysis offers a useful conceptual framework and accompanying methods for describing and analyzing the structure of a social system in an effort to understand how social relationships support and constrain the interpretation and use of data in educational improvement.
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