Examining Multilingual Students’ Experiences with Groupwork in Undergraduate Mathematics Courses

In mathematics education, active learning has become a well-established teaching pedagogy for improving student learning and promoting equity in undergraduate mathematics courses. However, a growing body of research questions whether students from underrepresented groups experience active learning in the same way and equitably benefit from it. Given the talk-intensive nature of active learning, it is important to consider how multilingual students (whose home languages are not English) navigate active classroom environments. Using Positioning Theory as a lens, in this talk I discuss findings from a mixed methods study examining the experiences of multilingual students in undergraduate mathematics courses that use active learning. Findings demonstrate that while multilingual students enacted a range of different positional identities during active learning, they were more likely to be positioned by peers in deficit ways. Results highlight how the positional identities available to students are often constrained by normative classroom discourses about language, participation, and mathematics.