Strategies to Affirm Students’ Cultures, Languages, and Identities
Adopt an Approach to Being a ‘Warm Demander’?
By Robert Q Berry III
The guidance below is excerpted from the blog “Three Ways Being a ‘Warm Demander’ is Culturally Responsive and Supports Students’ Mathematical Identity and Agency.”?Read the full post.
Much of my research has focused on identity and agency of Black boys to understand the ways these boys make sense of, respond to, and participate in mathematics. Identity has to do with how students engage with mathematics, how others perceive them, and how they see themselves as participatory in the space. Agency is seen in the ways students take risks to make their mathematical thinking visible and how they leverage problem-solving approaches that work for them.
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Teachers support students’ sense of agency in the values they communicate to through their words and actions, such as how they hold and express high expectations and show care for learners.?
For many students, high expectations and care are a proxy for how their teachers value them as people and learners.??
Warm demanders know students’ cultures, have strong relationships with students, and demand that they maximize their efforts, show respect, and follow classroom norms.?Warm demanders communicate their expectations of success by using personal warmth, while using instructional practices that insist on students meeting their high expectations.?From this perspective, caring in more than an affective connection between students and teachers.?It is actually a means for shaping students’ disposition towards mathematics, molding their mathematical identity, and developing students’ sense of agency by helping them believe that they can do mathematics.??
When being a warm demander as an?authority figure, a caregiver,?or a pedagogue, teachers overcome the passivity of low expectations and a low sense of agency through the care they show. They form connections with their students, which reinforces high expectations, supports positive classroom interactions, and demonstrates belief that all students can perform well in the mathematics classroom. Teachers must work to know and understand their students’ identities, histories, experiences, and cultural contexts; consider how mathematics and school experiences may differ for their students based on these contexts; and then connect these meaningfully with mathematics.??