Using a Two-Way Engagement Community- and Family-Centered Pedagogy to Prepare Pre-Service Mathematics Teachers in a Hispanic-Serving Institution

Research on effective methods to prepare pre-service teachers (PSTs) in teaching mathematics to K-12 Latin* students has been gaining significant momentum. These efforts have focused, in part, on promoting pedagogical practices that recognize and incorporate the culture and language that K-12 Latin* students and their communities share. As teacher educators, we argue that if we are to further prepare PSTs to serve the needs of such increasingly diversifying K-12 student population, the same pedagogical focus on the learner’s cultural wealth should also be applied to the preparation of PSTs themselves, especially among Latin* PSTs in Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) like ours. This paper documents how a university faculty prepared a cohort of Latin* PSTs using a Two-Way Engagement Community- and Family-Centered Pedagogy (CFCP) in a mathematics content course at an HSI. Twenty-four PSTs completed a semester-long mathematics project that involved interviewing local Latin* business owners or managers, interacting with local Latin* families, and presenting their projects at a local symposium. PSTs’ experiences showed that the implementation of the Two-Way CFCP in the mathematics classroom not only strengthened their mathematical content and pedagogy preparation but helped them to recognize their cultural wealth as a valuable educational resource.