PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Mind the ‘s’ in Individual-With-Contexts: Two Undergraduate Women Boosting Self-Efficacy in Mathematics
Page: 719
Investigations of students’ identities are shedding light on the processes that generate differential learning. In this paper, we expand the construct of dispositions to account for what individuals carry through their bodies and beliefs across contexts. While bringing back the attention to individualized dispositions, we avoid the trap of innateness. After we create a three-layered framework of dispositions to explain why and how two undergraduate women, Bettie and Melissa, develop differential confidence in mathematics through a semester-long number theory class. We learn that individualized dispositions can change throughout time, and desensitize or make individuals vulnerable to gendered, racialized, and sexualized stigma.