Teacher Positioning and Agency to Act: Talking about 'Low-Level' Students

In this paper, we share our dilemma of disrupting teachers' deficit frames of students. The data comes from a professional development program with nine secondary mathematics teachers. In particular, we attended to when teachers talk about "low-level" students. Drawing on Harré and van Langenhove's (1999) idea of positioning, we examined teachers' self positioning and their associated storylines. By noticing and attending to positionings and storylines in professional development, we suggest, mathematics teacher educators can consider how to disrupt these deficit frames by recasting positionings and storylines. [For the complete proceedings, see ED584443.]