Lynn Hodge, PhD

Professor Hodge's research focuses on equity as it plays out in math classrooms. Equity is then concerned with how instructional practices and resources open up spaces for students’ to learn and to develop and appreciation for math. This view of equity is in contrast to a perspective that focuses solely on students’ membership in groups based upon race, economic class, or gender. Statistics based on such categories have been useful in providing evidence of inequities in math education, but they have done little to reveal how the dynamics of race, class, and gender play out specifically in math classrooms.

Therefore, one strand within this research is to focus on classroom practices and how they afford or limit students’ opportunities to learn. A second strand is related to understanding common educational practices such as standardized tests and their implications for students’ math identities. One common criticism of equity research has been that it is often content-free. Hodge’s intent is to examine equity at the level of the specific practices in order to pay serious attention to mathematical content. These three strands are significant because they also inform her learning about how to support pre-service teachers’ learning.