The Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinos/as (CEMELA) recently hosted a research symposium that attracted more than 60 participants from four states.
The January 18-20 symposium at the UCSC Inn brought together CEMELA affiliates, including doctoral and postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and researchers in mathematics education. Participants discussed the center's research projects and their efforts to connect CEMELA initiatives to the work of other scholars in mathematics education. CEMELA is an interdisciplinary collaboration among education researchers at the University of Arizona, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of New Mexico, and UCSC. The center's focus is on research and practice in learning and teaching mathematics with Latino and Latina students in the United States.
"The symposium was especially important as a venue for fellows to present and receive feedback on their research," said CEMELA principal investigator Judit Moschkovich, associate professor of mathematics education at UCSC.
After morning presentations of four research papers, CEMELA advisory board members Kris Gutierrez, professor of social research methodology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Carne Barnett-Clarke, a researcher and project director at WestEd in Oakland, served as discussants, giving feedback on the papers in small groups.
Plenary-session guest speaker David Pimm, professor of mathematics education at the University of Alberta in Canada, gave a talk titled "Whom Have I the Pleasure of Addressing? Addressivity, the Spoken and the Written in the Mathematics Classroom." Guillermo Solano-Flores, associate professor of bilingual education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also delivered a plenary talk entitled "The Forms and Functions of Language: Implications for the Assessment of Mathematics Achievement in Linguistically Diverse Populations."
