Cognition and Instruction

ISSN: 0737-0008 (Print) 1532-690X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hcgi20

Looking at My (Real) World through Mathematics:

Memories and Imaginaries of Math and Science
Learning

Patricia M. Buenrostro & Josh Radinsky

To cite this article: Patricia M. Buenrostro & Josh Radinsky (2019) Looking at My (Real) World
through Mathematics: Memories and Imaginaries of Math and Science Learning, Cognition and
Instruction, 37:3, 390-407, DOI: 10.1080/07370008.2019.1624546

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2019.1624546

Published online: 24 Jun 2019.

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COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION
2019, VOL. 37, NO. 3, 390–407
https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2019.1624546

Looking at My (Real) World through Mathematics: Memories

and Imaginaries of Math and Science Learning
Patricia M. Buenrostroa and Josh Radinskyb
a
Department of Teaching & Learning, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA; bLearning Sciences/Curriculum
& Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT
Critical math and science educators have argued for pedagogies that focus on equity, social justice,
and the identities of learners. To inform debates about the purposes and values of math and sci-
ence pedagogy, we need to better understand how different kinds of curriculum and instruction
are taken up by learners over time. This study examines the ways one Latinx immigrant learner,
Calvin (a pseudonym), constructed the values and purposes of his earlier math and science learning
experiences, as an adult hoping to pursue a career in science. Narrative analysis is used to explore
the ways Calvin made sense of his learning of math and science in high school, in community col-
leges, and on his own. Drawing on the construct of appropriation, we examine the conceptual
tools Calvin took up from different math and science pedagogies (reform, critical, and traditional)
in narrating his desire to explore and understand scientific phenomena. Narrative frames position
Calvin with greater or lesser agency as he navigates different learning environments, imagines pos-
sible futures, and constructs the purposes of science and mathematics. The narratives of Calvin’s
learning illustrate the conceptual tools he appropriates from reform and social justice pedagogies:
real-to-my-life mathematics, learning as connecting and imagining, harder-but-easier math for a pur-
pose, and the ways reading and writing the world can be applied to imagining planets and the uni-
verse. The analysis suggests the usefulness of restorying as a way to explore how our pedagogies
interact with learners’ subjectivities, desires, values, and purposes for learning.

Introduction
Within the dominant discourses of STEM learning, it is widely assumed that students learn math
and science by mastering concepts and practices, through solving sets of problems; that these
learning targets and instructional tasks are defined by the practices of professional mathemati-
cians or scientists; and that classrooms should produce learners who can advance the work of sci-
ence and engineering, in the service of commercial and geopolitical competition (Roschelle,
Bakia, Tomaya, & Patton, 2011; Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018). STEM pedagogy, in this view, is seen
as a site of providing access to a world of STEM, where values and purposes are determined by
larger political and economic forces that go unquestioned.
In contrast, critical mathematics educators have advocated for mathematics teaching and learn-
ing that is grounded in the material realities of marginalized communities and their struggles for
justice (Frankenstein, 2005; Gutstein, 2006). Similarly, critical science pedagogy aims to create
transformative spaces that engage scientific knowledge as a catalyst for change (Morales-Doyle,
2017). These approaches critique mainstream mathematics and science education discourses in
which US global, economic interests are assumed to underlie the purposes of teaching and learn-
ing, instead offering the empowerment of marginalized peoples and communities as a core value

CONTACT Patricia M. Buenrostro patricia.m.buenrostro@vanderbilt.edu Peabody College of Education and Human

Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203-5721, USA.

These authors equally contributed to this work.
ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 391

(Bullock, 2017; Philip, Gupta, Elby, & Turpen, 2018). A common, underlying assumption from
this perspective is that students from marginalized communities in critical mathematics and sci-
ence classrooms will draw on their disciplinary knowledges and sense of social justice to enact
social change (Esmonde, 2014).
Although we are encouraged by this emerging redirection of justice-oriented STEM pedago-
gies, we hope to further the conversation by taking a closer look at the ways learners make sense
of such contrasting pedagogies within the contexts of their own lives. The burgeoning identity-
focused research on math and science learning is significant in this way by centering students’
experiences, reflections, and perspectives, positioning youth as purposeful and agentic (Barton &
Tan, 2010; Esmonde, 2014). As Gholson and Wilkes (2017) pointed out, “Identities serve as the
organizing link between macro-structural forces and face-to-face moments in which we all live”
(p. 233). Our interest here is in the ways such identities, and the meanings of such moments, are
constructed by learners for their own purposes, and in the pursuit of their own hopes
and desires.
By focusing on how people view the relationship among their math and science learning and
the passions that move them, we hope to emphasize the dignity of learners as authors of their
own lives and identities (Booker, Vossoughi, & Hooper, 2014). Similar to a desire-based frame-
work (Tuck, 2010), we center learners’ aspirations situated in the present and “enriched by both
the past and the future … [as] integral to our humanness” (p. 644). For this, we utilize the tools
of narrative analysis to examine the ways one learner makes sense of different math and science
pedagogies experienced over different phases of his life, and how he narrates his learning experi-
ences, identities, and desires. As Connelly and Clandinin (2006) explained,
People shape their daily lives by stories of who they and others are and as they interpret their past in terms
of these stories. Story … is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their
experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful. (p. 477)

Narrative, in this sense, is a deep dive into sense-making about lived experience, across contexts
and across time, which helps us think more deeply about the ways learners construct the values
and purposes of their math and science learning, and how they position this learning with respect
to who they desire to be in the world.
This study presents a case of one student’s narrations of his experiences with three distinct
mathematics pedagogies—traditional, reform, and critical—in relation to his identity as a learner
of math and science. We focus on an interview with Calvin,1 a Latinx young adult, to examine
his narration of his past, present, and future math and science learning experiences in high
school, college, and on his own, from his perspective as an adult seeking to pursue a career
in science.
We examine conceptual tools that Calvin has appropriated—that is, understandings that he
took away from those learning experiences and made his own, employing them as tools for
understanding the world and himself, and as tools for future learning. These tools are not specific
math or science concepts, but understandings of what it means to learn math or science, what
those disciplines are for, and who Calvin is as a learner of math and science. We ask the follow-
ing research questions:

1. What conceptual tools did Calvin appropriate from different math and science pedagogies
across different phases of his life?
2. How are these tools used to narrate Calvin’s identity as a learner?
3. How is Calvin positioned with different degrees of agency across the different frames in
which his math and science learning are narrated?

1All names of people and schools are pseudonyms, except for Patty (first author).
392 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

Theoretical framing
Identity-focused research examines the ways learners construct what it means to be a knower and
doer of mathematics or science, and the ways identities are constructed in the discourse and
interaction of learning environments (e.g., Barton & Tan, 2010; Heyd-Metzuyanim, 2015). This
body of research seeks explanations for the ways learners’ identities are constructed as they nego-
tiate experiences within and across learning environments.

Appropriation as a process of disciplinary learning

Levrini, Fantini, Tasquier, Pecori, and Levin (2015) argued that the heart of this learning is
Bakhtin’s construct of appropriation, defined as a “reflexive process … of transforming discourse
so as to embody it in one’s own personal story” (p. 119). For example, one of the participants in
their study uniquely appropriated the discourse of thermodynamics through a framework of
understanding “how things work,” motivated by his own curiosities for “things of the real world”
(p. 108). This focus on how learners appropriate things from discourses “capture[s] the connec-
tion between learning and identity as a reflexive process of creating and recreating a narrative of
one’s self” (Levrini et al., 2015, p. 99)—the connective tissue between identity formation
and learning.
Appropriation of a discipline-focused discourse, according to Levrini et al. (2015), is a pro-
cess that:

 results in a discourse populated with one’s own intentions, idiosyncratic tastes, purposes … ;
 respects the rules and constraints of … a discipline … ; and
 is intrinsically social in nature. … Namely, it is sensible both for oneself and also within the
social context of the classroom. (Levrini et al., 2015, p. 119)

This definition is operationalized in terms of five discursive markers that evidence learners’
uptake of disciplinary concepts or practices:

 Idiosyncratic: repeated use of unique, signature phrasing to talk about a particular idea;
 Disciplinarily grounded: such idiosyncratic ideas are used “for selecting pieces of disciplinary
knowledge and coordinating them in a way … [that respects] the rules and constraints” of a
discipline (Levrini et al., 2015, p. 118);
 Thick: the idiosyncratic idea involves both metacognitive and epistemological dimensions—i.e.,
reflects on one’s own learning, and on the nature of knowing in the discipline;
 Non-incidental: the idiosyncratic ideas are used consistently and intentionally across multiple
situations; and
 Carrier of social relationships: the idiosyncratic ideas are used to describe the ways one is posi-
tioned in the social situations from which the ideas originate.

These markers are valuable in this study for helping identify what conceptual tools have been
(or are being) appropriated from Calvin’s past math and science learning experiences, and how
they function in his construction of agentic math and science identities.
For learners to appropriate aspects of a disciplinary discourse, they must determine if, and
how, particular concepts or discursive practices “can serve their own sense-making purposes”
(Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992, p. 67). Rosebery et al. argued that appropriation of concep-
tual tools from discourses can be challenging because “discourses are inherently ideological; they
crucially involve a set of values and viewpoints in terms of which one speaks, thinks, and acts”
(p. 67). Traditional math and science pedagogies often present an image of authority in which
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 393

many marginalized learners struggle to see themselves reflected, making it difficult to appropriate
disciplinary concepts and practices (Levrini et al., 2015). For example, students may master these
concepts and practices without appropriating them into their own (disciplinary) identity. Learners
who are constructed as outside the realm of STEM discourses of power, due to racism, sexism,
classism, or other marginalizing social forces, must develop their own strategies to appropriate
these disciplinary tools within affirming and agentic identities (McGee & Martin, 2011).

Narrative, agency, and identity

A valuable tool for studying appropriation is narrative analysis (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006;
Wortham, 2001), which uses discourse-analytic methods to examine the functions of stories and
storytelling in constructing identities and settings. Narrative is not just a window on people’s
evolving identities, but also a process through which identities are constructed. Telling one’s own
(and others’) stories has implications for how someone views themselves in the past, and who
one becomes in the future. Narratives shape identities not only in the stories that are told but
also in the social interactions in which the storytelling happens—what Wortham (2001) referred
to as the narrating event. When we interview someone about their life, we co-construct a set of
relationships that position both interlocutors as particular kinds of people, with particular rela-
tionships to one another, to other people, and to the world—including the worlds of math and
science. These processes of positioning construct dynamic identities with different kinds of
agency—both within a narrative and also in life outside that narrative (Ochs & Capps, 1996;
Wortham, 2001).
In this way, disciplinary learning involves the appropriation of conceptual tools with which to
narrate one’s own disciplinary life experiences and identity. These tools can give us greater or
lesser agency in our own construction of how we learn math and science, and can construct us as
individuals with greater or lesser agency in the world. Narrative analysis gives us a method for
examining relationships of agency and power in this learning process, and a window on how rela-
tionships among learners, teachers, mathematics, and science emerge together over years and life
phases. Rather than assume any predetermined definition of math or science learning—whether
from a dominant-discourse STEM perspective or from one of critical pedagogy—we examine the
meanings, practices and purposes of math and science as constructed within Calvin’s narrations
of his learning, to better situate that learning within his lived experience. Through centering the
learner’s values and purposes, we reconsider different pedagogies from the perspective of what
they come to mean in the life narratives and desires of the learner.

Methods
This study draws on data collected for the first author’s dissertation (Buenrostro, 2016) where 13
self-selected participants were interviewed 2 to 4 years after graduating as part of the inaugural
class at Freedom High School (FHS). Patty (first author) interviewed Calvin 4 years after he had
graduated from FHS. Calvin’s interview was chosen for this narrative analysis because it offered
unexpected and seemingly contradictory purposes for learning math and science, in the context
of the pedagogies he had encountered at FHS. We pursued this analysis with the feeling that
there was a more nuanced and complicated story to tell here.
FHS was born out of a decades-long community struggle for educational and political justice
in a predominately Latinx immigrant and working-class community. During the inaugural years,
FHS teachers made a concerted effort to infuse social justice topics across the curriculum. The
core mathematics curriculum was the reform-based Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP). In
the 4th year, a veteran, critical mathematics educator taught a Mathematics for Social Justice
(M4SJ) class for 12th graders. The M4SJ curriculum foregrounded students’ lived contexts and
394 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

experiences (e.g., gentrification) to support students’ capacity to engage with and leverage concep-
tually rich mathematics. The hope was that by centering issues prevalent in their communities,
youth would use mathematics as a tool to deepen their understanding of their socio-political real-
ity, which, in turn, would motivate them to act to alter that reality.
As an FHS founding member and life-long community resident, Patty had volunteered her
time with the mathematics department in the early years of FHS to advance both a reform and
critical-mathematics agenda. She collaborated with the mostly novice teachers in implementing
the core curriculum, IMP, and collaborated with a senior teacher-researcher on the M4SJ class.
Structurally, these two curricular spaces of reform (IMP) and critical (M4SJ) math were similar in
the sense that students worked in groups to solve contextualized mathematics problems.
Pedagogically, however, the purposes and discourses of learning mathematics were distinct: In the
M4SJ class, the mathematical and sociopolitical dimensions of learning ebbed and flowed across
all aspects of the classroom (Balasubramanian, 2012), whereas the sociopolitical dimension of
learning was largely absent from the reform-oriented spaces of IMP.
This analysis grew out of the authors’ overlapping histories and shared experiences as teachers
and researchers. Josh (second author) had been a bilingual teacher in the neighborhood where
FHS was later to be founded, where we (Patty and Josh) taught together at an alternative high
school. Over the years, our conversations about teaching and learning evolved as we moved into
research and teacher education. As a graduate student in Josh’s research methods class, Patty col-
laborated with Josh on an analysis of classroom interactions in the M4SJ classroom, where Patty
was then a teacher-researcher, and Calvin was a student. Patty subsequently completed the inter-
views (including Calvin’s), which would later inform her dissertation study, for which Josh served
as a committee member. In our conversations across these years, a recurring theme was our
shared interest in the roles narratives play in students’ and teachers’ interactional positioning.

Who is Calvin?
Calvin, a Mexican man in his 20s, was interviewed due to his participation in the M4SJ class. He
had hoped to attend a STEM academy as a high school freshman, but due to enrollment capacity,
he was registered at FHS instead. Despite not being interested in the “whole social justice” aspect
of the school, the number of caring and passionate teachers who “personally got involved with
their students” was the most significant feature of FHS that stood out for him many years later.
Since high school, Calvin had gotten married, taken a number of courses in different commu-
nity colleges (Hawthorne Junior College and Parks Community College, pseudonyms) toward an
associate’s degree, and developed a strong interest in becoming a scientist. At the time of the
interview, he was working full-time at a factory, and trying to balance the challenges of tuition,
work load, and family commitments. During the interview, Calvin revealed that he was undocu-
mented, and was hoping to adjust his legal status, which would enable him to qualify for financial
aid to cover tuition and expenses to complete his degree. While at FHS he had qualified for a
4-year academic scholarship to Carver University, but fell one point short of the required ACT
score despite many attempts (“the stupid ACT screwed me”). In recent months he had been com-
municating with an administrator from Carver University, and she had told him he was a few
classes short of being able to transfer to Carver.

Data analysis
The interview took place in Patty’s kitchen, and was audio-recorded and transcribed. Using narra-
tive analysis, we examined the interview as an extended series of narrated events (Leander, 2001;
Wortham, 2001). Our interest was in the ways Calvin narrated his learning of mathematics and
science across different contexts. The interview transcript was coded for narrated events, bounded
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 395

by shifts in any of the three commonplaces of narrative analysis: temporality, sociality, and place
(Clandinin, Pushor & Orr, 2007; Leander, 2001). The commonplaces account for the fluidity of
narrative across past, present, and future; the personal and social conditions within the story and
between the interlocutors; and the importance of place. These dimensions are used to distinguish
features that differentiate narratives, and that define the properties of the world that is con-
structed in each narrative—the rules that govern the stories that are told, the agency and identi-
ties of the people, and the ways space and time operate in the narrated world (Bakhtin, 1981).

Coding narrated events

A total of 47 narrated events were identified and coded, consisting of between five and 34 turns
of dialog, and each event was given a title from an en vivo phrase in the discourse. Where there
were differences in the bounding of events, we negotiated changes, resulting in four events being
split into separate events. To give a sense of the process, some narrated events’ titles are:

 Mr. Dario Connected Science to the World

 Me On My Own—Getting More Interested
 They Didn’t Care at Hawthorne
 Math on the Computer at Hawthorne

To illustrate the bounding of events, two consecutive events are “They Didn’t Care at
Hawthorne” and “Math on the Computer at Hawthorne.” Both occur at Hawthorne, but they
foreground different settings, marked by shifts in temporality and place (from the general time
period of Calvin’s attending Hawthorne, to a particular time in one class), and sociality (charac-
ters shift from Hawthorne teachers in general, to one math teacher and Calvin). A single event
could also involve multiple times and places in combination, as when high school and college
experiences were contrasted with each other, creating what Leander (2001) called a hybridization
of space-time within a narrated event. Such hybridization enables us to see how Calvin’s narra-
tives draw parallels and contrasts across separate life experiences and time frames.

Identifying narrative frames

We analyzed each narrated event independently for temporality, sociality, and place, noting par-
ticularly the ways these dimensions shaped the agency of characters in the narratives. We repeat-
edly compared notes and arrived at a shared interpretation of each event in terms of these
analytic categories. The events were then categorized into narrative frames (detailed in the ana-
lysis section)—settings that reappear across multiple narratives, with similar constellations of
temporality, sociality and place, and which construct agency for their characters in similar ways.

Identifying instances of appropriation

In the language used to construct these narrated events, we looked for instances of Calvin’s
appropriation of particular resources—concepts for explaining math and science learning—that
were developed in the narratives. We coded for Levrini et al.’s (2015) five discursive markers of
appropriation: concepts used repeatedly by Calvin that were idiosyncratic, disciplinarily-grounded,
“thick” (i.e., connecting metacognitive processes to disciplinary epistemologies), nonincidental
across social contexts, and carriers of social relationships (p. 118). The final marker (carriers of
social relationship) would require analysis of additional data sets (e.g., classroom interaction ana-
lysis) and, therefore, is not included in this article. Notwithstanding, the remaining markers
helped us identify particular concepts, repeated across multiple narratives of math and science
396 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

learning, that became tools for making sense of Calvin’s math and science learning, across phases
of his life.

Findings and analysis

In the analysis presented here, we track how Calvin’s agency as a learner of math and science is
mediated by his appropriation and use of these tools to narrate his life experiences in the past,
present, and future. To recount, we are interested in understanding:

1. What conceptual tools Calvin appropriated from different math and science pedagogies
across different phases of his life?
2. How are these tools used to narrate Calvin’s identity as a learner?
3. How is Calvin positioned with different degrees of agency across the different frames in
which his math and science learning are narrated?

The analysis of the interview is organized into three narrative frames that emerged, corre-
sponding closely to three contexts of Calvin’s math and science learning in different phases of his
life: (a) his high school math and science learning, (b) Calvin learning math and science on his
own, and (c) his college math and science classes. The analysis explores the ways math and sci-
ence learning is narrated with particular purposes within each of the frames; how the properties
of each frame shape the agency that is attributed to Calvin and others; and what kinds of under-
standings are appropriated, as evidenced by the narratives in each frame.
The final section of the data analysis examines the evidence of agency and appropriation in
the interactions between Calvin and Patty in the interview itself (Wortham’s “narrating event”).
We argue that the coconstruction of these narrative frames by Calvin and Patty in the interview,
and the positioning that they afford, constitute another context of math and science learning—
another context in which ideas about math and science learning are being appropriated and nar-
rated, constructing Calvin’s agency and identity. The narratives that emerge from the interview
are not simply facts about the world or characteristics of Calvin, but rather the product of two
people’s interactions (Calvin’s and Patty’s) in a particular place and time. The coconstruction of
such narratives about math and science learning is itself a site of appropriation and identity con-
struction—that is, a site of learning. By “storying” and “restorying” (McKamey, 2011; Sengupta-
Irving, Redman & Enyedy, 2013), math and science learning experiences together, a former
teacher and former student create opportunities for new learning, through the appropriation of
new conceptual tools for sense-making.

Frame 1: High school teachers and curriculum “making it connect”

The narrated events from high school are constructed within a frame in which Calvin’s agency as
a learner of math and science is obscured by the agency of his teachers and the curriculum. In
these high school narratives, learning is associated with teachers or curriculum “making things
connect.” For example, Mr. Dario’s Chemistry class is described as follows:
12 C: It was really good. It was fun to be in that class. He didn’t make it boring and just throwing facts at
you. He tried to connect it with the world … he always played music in the beginning of classes that
related to science in a way or social justice. So it was pretty good. That’s the one that stood out for me.

The learning experience was “really good” and “stood out” because of Mr. Dario, who is the char-
acter taking action in this narration—trying to make things connect, relating science to music or
social justice.
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 397

Other high school narratives highlight the curriculum as the one with agency to make things
connect (or not), rather than the teacher. For example, Calvin narrates the IMP (reform) curricu-
lum used by Ms. Gutierrez as “connect[ing] to the world,” contrasting it with later college cur-
riculum (traditional):
228 C: With Ms. Gutierrez? She was really good.
229 P: Yeah. Did you notice that the math curriculum was different than what you probably had in
California [elementary school]?
230 C: Yeah, the IMP thing. I liked it a little bit. It was really, it’s hard when you go from IMP back to
college and then you’re just, you’re just do[ing] problems. No word problems. Just math.
231 P: Yeah.
232 C: It [college math] doesn’t connect to the world.
233 P: Yeah. So that was hard?
234 C: Yeah, but I like IMP ‘cause it did connect to the world.

Ms. Gutierrez has some agency in this narrative (228), but it is the IMP (reform) curriculum
that does the active work of connecting (234), unlike the college (traditional) curriculum that fails
to connect (232), leaving you with “just math” (230).
This idea of connecting becomes more nuanced in narrating Mr. Jessen’s precalculus class,
where we begin to see how math and science are related to each other for Calvin:
308 C: Jessen’s class [was] more like physics related, I guess. Cause … one time … there was an
assignment we were doing about
309 P: The Ferris wheel?
310 C: Yeah, the Ferris wheel, where the guy jumps into a water and how when does he jump in order
to fall.
…
313 P: It’s an IMP 4 unit. Did you think that was interesting?
314 C: Yeah, I really liked it.
315 P: Yeah. It was pretty interesting. And you start to get into a little bit in trig in that. Do you
remember that or no?
316 C: No. I just remember I liked it and it was fun.
317 P: You liked it? And what did you like about it?
318 C: The whole physics thing.
319 P: The fact that it was related to something you could imagine.
320 C: You can see, yeah.

Although it is a math class, Jessen’s class is described as “more physics related” and the scen-
ario of the Ferris wheel jump is narrated as part of “the whole physics thing” (318). These
exchanges signal varying degrees of agentic positioning. On the one hand, the IMP curriculum is
narrated as responsible for the connection between mathematics and something imaginable. On
the other hand, when Patty tries to explore the mathematical contents of the unit (315) Calvin
resists talking about math (316), and instead foregrounds the connection to science as the mem-
orable attribute (318).
Patty and Calvin extend the idea of “physics-related” math problems to “something you can
imagine,” or something “you can see” (317-320). Specifically, math was memorable because you
could see, in the literal sense, how it was connected to science. This construction of math and sci-
ence connecting (to the real world, to each other, and to Calvin as a learner), and the idea of
398 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

being able to imagine or see them, become conceptual tools in Calvin and Patty’s conversation
for making sense of other learning contexts as the interview progresses.
The most in-depth high school narratives involve Calvin’s M4SJ class, taught by Mr. Al, which
bring out additional meanings of connecting and imagining, and signal a shift in the narration of
Calvin’s agency. Calvin’s emphasis on his learning in M4SJ is surprising, because, unlike most of
the other students interviewed, Calvin explicitly distances himself from the social justice mission
of the school: “I didn’t really pay attention to the whole, the social justice thing.”
Notwithstanding, he emphasizes Mr. Al’s passion and commitment to social justice issues as
exceptional. He narrates Mr. Al’s class as a place where learning mathematics was closely tied to
emotional and relational aspects of the experience:
528 C: I know Mr. Al was really pushing for everyone to pass. He was, I think he was sometimes, he felt
like angry if you weren’t putting enough effort. I feel bad for that ‘cause I know I was one of
those students.
…
531 P: Did you feel like you learned more math [in the M4SJ class]?
532 C: I felt like I was less scared of math. Not that I learned more math, just less scared putting it to
use. You know, looking at the world through, like they said, like looking at the world through mathematics.
I thought that was really important. That’s what it taught me.

There is an emotional thread running through this exchange (the word feel/felt is repeated
four times). Calvin feels (present tense) guilty about having been “one of those students” that
made Mr. Al angry, indicating a mutually responsive relationship in which Calvin felt responsible
for not meeting Mr. Al’s expectations (528).
But despite this emotional intensity, Calvin was less intimidated by the mathematics in this
class (532). Calvin repositions Patty’s question about whether he learned “more math” in M4SJ
(531) to becoming “less scared putting it to use.” To explain this, Calvin appropriates a phrase
drawn from the M4SJ literature (e.g., Gutstein, 2016) that the teacher often used to frame the
class goal: “reading and writing the world with mathematics.” In his uptake of this idea, though,
Calvin revises the wording: “looking at the world through mathematics” (532), emphasizing see-
ing. He explicitly claims this learning as his own (532): “I thought that was really important.
That’s what it taught me.” Calvin is appropriating ideas from a particular discourse (M4SJ) about
how one might use mathematics for something—a discourse where mathematics is positioned as
purposeful, as a tool.
Calvin repeatedly emphasizes the difficulty of the mathematics in the M4SJ class, comparing it
to IMP: “We’d break down into groups [in IMP] as well. And it felt the same. It’s just hard
math, harder math [in M4SJ].” Patty inquires into this relationship among mathematical diffi-
culty, fear, and learning:
545 P: It’s just harder? It’s just harder? And even though it was har—so that’s interesting, even though it
was harder, you were like less scared?
546 C: Yeah, yeah, because … when we did IMP, it would be … word problems and stuff and it did
connect it to the world, but it wasn’t connec—I didn’t feel it was connected to like to things happening
right there and then such as the election, you said, and the housing so I feel like
547 P: They’re real life but not real to your life.
548 C: Then these things are real to our, to our lives.
549 P: So that made a difference in making it easier?
550 C: Making it harder and easier. ‘Cause I mean harder ‘cause it was hard math but easier because it
was easier to relate to.
551: P: So that experience helped you feel less intimidated
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 399

552 C: Yeah
553 P: By the math?
554 C: Yeah. ‘Cause I mean like I think if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be so interested in science as well
because I mean like the problems, orbits and planets, I’m really interested in that yet I have no idea how to do it
but I would like to learn.
555 P: Interesting
556 C: Now if I wouldn’t have taken that class, I probably wouldn’t have been so into it.

Whereas IMP math was connected in limited ways (546), M4SJ connected math to “things
happening right there and then.” Calvin and Patty develop this idea into a distinction between
two ways math curriculum might connect: “real life” versus “real to our lives” (547-548), a con-
ceptual tool developed in the interview to narrate a key distinction between the IMP reform
approach and the M4SJ critical approach to math pedagogy.
Calvin narrates this kind of real-to-our-lives learning as being both “harder and easier” (550):
“harder ‘cause it was hard math but easier because it was easier to relate to.” This quality of
harder-but-more-relatable is the connective tissue for Calvin in wanting to learn about the scien-
tific world and a means through which he is able to imagine learning the mathematics of the sci-
entific world as a possibility. Calvin pivots from feeling less intimidated by the math (553) to
thinking about how his learning in one context (M4SJ) could be translated to his desired, scien-
tific pursuits (554): “I think if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be so interested in science.” This piv-
oting suggests a change in Calvin’s epistemic stance regarding how the physical world can
be known.
In this last context, Calvin is positioned with greater agency than is the case for reform or
traditional mathematics classrooms: He was able to take away certain interests and insights
(which will be further elaborated in the next narrative frame). In narrating his experiences learn-
ing difficult-but-relatable mathematics, we see a consistent and productive discourse emerging
that bolsters his scientific imagination:

 the idea of looking at the world through mathematics as a useful lens for exploring concepts
that matter to him;
 the realization that math could be less intimidating when situated within a personally mean-
ingful context (“real to our lives”);
 the realization that the key to learning difficult mathematics is being able to see or imagine
connections among math, science, and the real world (making it “harder but easier”).

Although Mr. Al modeled these connections in the form of math for social justice, Calvin
drew on this model to reconceptualize how to make hard math manageable by relating it, not to
math or social justice, but to the physics of planetary orbits (the significance of which becomes
apparent in Frame 2).
Here we see Calvin appropriating conceptual tools with which to engage mathematics purpose-
fully in the service of his personal curiosities. In this, we note two markers of appropriation
(Levrini et al., 2015). Calvin’s repeated use of terms like “make it connect,” “seeing,” and
“imagining” suggest idiosyncratic signature ideas (p. 118) that are central to Calvin’s perspective
on learning mathematics and science. The fact that Calvin expresses these ideas both in terms of
own metacognitive awareness of his learning (harder but easier, less afraid of putting it to use)
and in terms of an image of the discipline’s epistemology that makes sense to him (looking at the
world through mathematics) suggests what Levrini et al. (2015) called a thick discursive marker
of appropriation.
400 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

Frame 2: Calvin on his own, becoming a lover of science

In this second narrative frame, Calvin positions himself with much greater agency as he describes
learning on his own since high school, outside of any classroom. Learning is narrated as a solitary
and fulfilling experience with books and videos, clearly showing Calvin’s intense personal identifi-
cation with the desire to know science.
His own agency and commitment to learning are narrated as key factors in his developing
identity as a lover of science:
19 P: Did you always like science?
20 C: Yeah—no, wait. … I did not always like it but I started to like [it] during high school and I love it
now. That’s what I want to go into now.
21 P: Really?
22 C: Yeah.
23 P: How come, just from that experience [in Mr. Dario’s class]?
24 C: Yeah, because it was that experience, basically just that experience and me on my own looking at
science stuff and getting more interested.
25 P: Is there a particular science that you’re interested in?
26 C: Now, I’m [interested in] astronomy and biology. I like those two.
27 P: And how did you get into like biology?
28 C: I went through like two textbooks on my own, biology books, and I just like it.
29 P: After high school you went through two
30 C: Yeah, on my own just looked through two textbooks. Did all the works, like the little examples that
they give you and all the questions and I did those for two books.

Mr. Dario’s class sparked Calvin’s initial identification with science (12 above), but it
was Calvin’s own explorations that brought him to his present love of science (24). Calvin
narrates his independent studies with clear pride in working through two textbooks: He
repeats “on my own” twice (28, 30). His own agency is salient in bringing him to his
present science identity: “I love it now.”
When asked what mathematics he would like to know, Calvin answers by immediately
recentering the question on science, reprising his concept of math that is “physics related”
(308 above):
397 C: Well, I would like to know the physics-like math, ‘cause I like astronomy, so I watch a lot of
videos about astronomy.
398 P: Mmm. so you say astronomy, I think of stars.
399 C: I’m thinking about like orbits and planets. So how does that happen? That’s what I would like to
know. Like what are the equations of how do you do that math to find how do they start doing that math
in, how, you know how
400 P: to even model it.
401 C: Like, how did they even begin when they had no technology? How did they measure it?
…
405 C: Yeah, like I think they talk about what’s the, for the gravity, I think the inverse square law or
something. But I don’t understand it.
406 P: Right, right, right. So sometimes you see that and you’re like wow, I w–, I’d kind of like to know.
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 401

407 C: Yeah, I would like to know that, yeah.

This learning is narrated in imagined spaces of scientific discovery (399, 401) and is driven by
the desire to know more (405, 407). Placing this desire in the future tense (399, 407), Calvin nar-
rates himself as becoming a science person, through his own intense curiosities and independent
work. Conceptual tools appropriated from the high school narratives—physics-like math, connect-
ing through imagination—are deployed here in narrating Calvin’s emergent science identity, and
his desire to learn science at new levels.
Although Calvin states that he does not yet understand the inverse square law (405), he
grounds his curiosities in disciplinary concepts (orbits, planets, gravity) and practices (finding
equations to calculate orbits, with and without modern technology) of astronomy. Calvin con-
nects his awareness of his own learning process to the nature of scientific epistemologies: how
astronomers come to understand the things they do (399, 401). This learning, for Calvin, is
clearly non-incidental, given the extensive time and effort he invests in it.
These discursive markers in Calvin’s narratives (idiosyncratic, disciplinarily grounded, noninci-
dental, with metacognitive and epistemological dimensions) suggest that he is appropriating sci-
ence concepts and practices within his emerging science identity. In Bakhtin’s words, we see a
process by which these concepts become “‘one’s own’ … when the speaker populates it with his
own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic
and expressive intention” (Bakhtin, 1981, quoted in Levrini et al., 2014, p. 97). For Calvin, learn-
ing about orbital movement is a personal endeavor that extends beyond the walls of a classroom
and any given curriculum. He goes beyond Patty’s description of astronomer’s work as
“modeling” the world with mathematics (400), to place himself in an imagined historical past in
which astronomers calculated planetary equations and measured orbits “when they had no tech-
nology” (399, 401).
Calvin shows the personal importance of his science learning as he imagines a possible future
identity, narrating a vivid image of desire:
478 C: Like, if I were really smart and I knew everything, I would like to work in FermiLab in Chi—
in Illinois.
479 P: Have you ever been there?
480 C: No, but … I’ve been to their website many times.
482 P: … and what do they do? …
481 C: There’s a particle accelerator where they put two particles that go separate ways and they smash
them against each other and then they just
483 P: They split them?
484 C: Yeah, they split, they study them … to recreate the big bang … and I think that’s pretty cool.

This narration goes beyond stating a place where he would like to work, to describe the
research equipment, subatomic phenomena, and purpose of the research at a temporal scale of
the history of the universe (“to recreate the big bang”). Calvin’s own identity in this story is an
image of his desire for learning: “if I were really smart and knew everything.”
This narrative frame allows for this kind of exploration of imagination, hopes, and desires, giv-
ing shape and purpose to Calvin’s science learning, and situates math strictly in the service of sci-
ence (“the physics-like math,” 397). Whereas the narratives of high school learning in Frame 1
featured agentic teachers and curriculum, in this frame Calvin narrates himself as someone with
intense scientific curiosities, with the agency and motivation to complete whole textbooks without
the help of a teacher, and with a dream of a possible future investigating the mysteries of the big
bang. The conceptual tools that he has appropriated from his high school experiences have
become central to his evolving science identity.
402 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

Frame 3: Navigating college classes and teachers

In sharp contrast to both of the first two frames, the frame for narrating college classes is stark
and minimal, with little description of places, no sense of events playing out over periods of time,
and generally only one character at a time—the teacher. Classes are narrated almost entirely in
terms of Calvin’s brief evaluations of instructors:
91 P: So at Hawthorne [Community College], you felt it was kind of cold?
92 C: Yeah, like teachers, yeah, yeah
…
99 P: How was English?
100 C: It was good. Yeah, it was good. The teacher was okay.
…
126 P: And how was that [astronomy] class?
127 C: It was good. The teacher was fun but it was good. It was an easy class.
When more details are included, they are strictly relational with teachers:
62 C: The first teacher was really bad. He was he just seemed like every time you said an answer, a wrong
answer, he would kind of judge you. He would make faces and think that, he looked like he thought he was
smarter than everyone else. I mean he was … but he showed it.
86 C: I think that teachers at Parks [Community College] are better in some ways [than at Hawthorne
Community College]. They’re, I don’t know they seemed like, it reminded me a little bit of Freedom High,
that they care.

In Frame 1, relational details of interactions with teachers were also important to the narra-
tives, but in the contexts of math and science learning that connected; of content that could be
harder or easier in different ways; and of particular kinds of math and science curriculum prob-
lems that Calvin engaged with in different ways.
In contrast, in the frame for college stories, learning is not narrated in these terms. In fact,
Calvin himself hardly even shows up as a character. In this frame, Calvin constructs himself as
not having much agency, and the sparse language of the narratives mainly do not include the
markers of appropriation seen in the other two frames. Math, in the narratives of the traditional
college pedagogy, sits by itself, without connecting to anything:
596 C: … [math classes in] colleges just goes back straight to math. There’s no imagining. There’s no
application. There’s nothing. It’s just math.

Patty at times pushes for a deeper discussion of college coursework, to explore possibilities.
She engages Calvin in thinking about what his next steps might be to advance toward enrolling
in a bachelors program. In discussing what classes to take, she brings in the idea of connecting
that featured so prominently in Frame 1:
325 P: So calculus, you might see a little bit of that [connecting] because [in] calculus there are some word
problems … but it’s gonna be a lot of formulas. But it’ll be a little bit of word problems.
326 C: Yeah maybe physics will probably be funner because then it’s like they give examples of about
things you can imagine because that’s the only way you can do physics, can’t you? Like just imagining?
327 P: Yeah, so physics is, yeah so it’s like modeling.
328 C: Yeah

Calvin takes up the idea of connecting, but he immediately shifts the topic to physics, not cal-
culus: He describes imagining as both a (“funner”) way of learning, and as what physicists do
(326). This links Calvin’s metacognitive awareness of his own learning process with a
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 403

conceptualization of the epistemology of physics—a thick marker of his appropriation of this con-
ceptual tool (connecting-through-imagining) that was introduced in the Frame 1 narrative. Patty
relabels this connecting-through-imagining tool as “modeling” (327), an idea that they explore
throughout the interview as a more formal version of “making it connect” and “seeing/imagining”
the world.
Calvin uses these ideas to make the relationships of math to science explicit:
498 C: So I’ll probably take it when I go back. I’ll take calculus and physics.
499 P: Yeah, they probably go very good hand and hand actually.
500 C: Cause they’ll relate it to it. I’ll be able to memorize [the math] more because I’ll be using it more.

In this frame, the future is envisioned in tenuous terms (“probably” 498, 499) and math learn-
ing is characterized in traditional, superficial pedagogical language (“memorize it more”).
Nevertheless, in this interactive narration of a possible future, Calvin and Patty apply conceptual
tools developed in the high school stories (connecting, imagining, math-for-science, modeling) to
try to construct a more agentic identity for Calvin in college: choosing a math and a science class
to take at the same time, so “they’ll relate it to it” (the math to the science), and Calvin will “be
able to memorize [the math] more.” Here the solution is not having to rely on an instructor
(who may or may not care), but rather Calvin using his hard work ethic that he has developed
on his own, finding the ways the math connects to the science—making it “harder but easier”
because he will be “putting it to use.”

Negotiating the terms of the narrating event

Finally, we briefly examine the ways Calvin exerts his agency in shaping the narratives and narra-
tive frames that emerge in the interview. Here we shift from examining the narrated events across
three frames, to examining the narrating event itself (Calvin and Patty’s interaction in the inter-
view) as a site of agency and positioning.
We have noted ways in which Calvin redirects several of Patty’s questions onto his own terms.
For example, when Patty asks about math (the focus of her dissertation study), Calvin repeatedly
responds with his thoughts about science. Jessen’s math class becomes “the physics-like math”
(397). Mr. Al’s M4SJ (math) class is described as the reason Calvin is so into science (554, 556).
When Patty brings up the idea of taking calculus in college, Calvin suggests taking it with physics
(498). An interview about math becomes a conversation about science.
Another way Calvin exerts his agency is in the subtle ways he resists interactions that might
position him as receiving (or needing) help from Patty. In several interactions not shown here,
Patty’s attempts to help Calvin problem-solve his way into a 4-year university are politely set
aside, and questions about him addressing his documentation status and financial aid are
answered briefly, followed by topic changes. Most explicitly, Patty attempts to engage him in a
tutoring session to help him review trigonometry concepts at the end of the interview, but Calvin
abruptly and clearly refuses this positioning:
640 P: So the thing is like with the tangent and the sine, so you know you wanna kind of understand why
they look that way, right? Because like the tangent looks like this, right? [drawing a graph] Doesn’t it look
like this?
641 C: Yeah, and like on the other side as well.
642 P: Mmhm, right, so. It has these what they call asymptotes, right? Remember that word?

This interaction begins to position Patty as a math teacher, and Calvin as a learner potentially
in need of tutoring. But after 16 turns of intensive trig review, Calvin breaks out of the tutorial
and challenges this mode of discourse:
404 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

657 C: But I don’t understand how does that [unit circle] relate to at all to anything.
658 P: To anything, right?
659 C: Yeah what’s the point of trig?
660 P: That’s a good question. I don’t know if I could answer it.
661 C: I don’t understand that. It’s like we were doing it but I don’t understand why are we doing it.
What’s the point? What does the circle have to do with anything?
Here Calvin disrupts the tutorial talk and assumes an agentic voice of resistance. Patty shifts from her
teacher voice, and joins Calvin in cross-examining the disconnected nature of mathematics:
664 P: That’s a very good question. Did you ever ask [the trig instructor] that?
665 C: No I didn’t. I should have.
666 P: That’d be a good question. And sometimes some teachers, they can’t answer those questions cause
we didn’t learn it. But clearly for you, that’s a really important question.
667 C: Yes it is. It’s the question that if I don’t know it then it makes it hard for me to un—to learn to
even do it because it’s like what’s the point.
668 P: Yeah, that’s a good point. So that’s why, like if you learn the math through the science
669 C: It would be better for me, yeah.
670 P: It’d be better for you.

In response to Calvin’s critical question (“What’s the point of trig?”), Patty shifts from math
tutor to pedagogical critic (660, 666). Her observation that “some teachers” can’t answer it (666)
becomes a self-critique of her own learning experiences (“we didn’t learn it”), which puts Calvin
and Patty on equal ground in terms of agency in the interaction.
Together Calvin and Patty return to some of the conceptual tools that have emerged for
explaining Calvin’s learning over the course of the interview: Harder math can become easier
when putting it to use; learning needs to connect; imagining is a key aspect of doing science;
Calvin learns math best through science. Calvin has shifted the narration of his learning to this
more agentic framing of their conversation, in which they together apply ideas they have co-con-
structed toward narrating a desired future of learning math through science (668-670).

Discussion
This analysis has illustrated conceptual tools appropriated by Calvin, how these shaped narratives
of his identity as a learner, and the ways three distinctive narrative frames construct Calvin with
different kinds of agency across contexts. His high school learning is narrated in a frame that
constructs teachers with agency to make science and math connect in various ways. However,
Calvin’s narratives also show how he has appropriated certain conceptual tools that he can now
apply in his adult life: he can make math and science learning connect, and use them to see and
imagine the world, by making them real-to-his-life. Following Mr. Al’s M4SJ example, Calvin can
make it easier to put even hard math to use—for science. These appropriated tools became iden-
tity resources, bolstering his agency as a math and science learner.
The second frame was used to narrate the great agency for learning that Calvin has developed
since high school, learning on his own. Without needing the mediation of any agentic teacher,
Calvin has grown his love of science into a passionate future image of desire, through hard work
in his own personal space. The tools appropriated from his high school learning experiences have
become useful to him as an adult “science person” with agency to learn and explore on his own.
In particular, learning about real-to-my-life issues became a gateway for Calvin to apprehend
difficult-yet-relatable mathematics in the service of learning physics.
 COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 405

However, the third frame reveals contradictions that Calvin is facing in working his way
through college math and science classes: Teachers are narrated as the main thing that matters in
these classes. They may judge you (62), or they may care, like FHS teachers (86), but Calvin’s
agency as a learner is challenged in this frame. Patty and Calvin try to apply the tools he was
able to appropriate in Frames 1 and 2 to strategize about college classes, even though the imag-
ined, college future feels tenuous.
In the interview itself, we see Calvin’s agency in shaping the narration of learning that he and
Patty will engage in—and, importantly, the narratives that he will not engage in. Calvin resists
focusing on math in isolation, always bringing it into conversation with science and the real
world; he resists constructing himself as someone who needs help from teachers, including Patty;
he joins Patty on more equal footing in reflecting on different approaches to math pedagogy
(traditional, reform, and critical); and together with Patty, he co-narrates ways forward that might
work for him in achieving his cherished desire to do science.
Why do these observations about Calvin and Patty’s narratives matter? Aren’t they, after all,
just stories? To the contrary, we argue that narrative frames are important resources with which
people appropriate ideas and develop identities—that is, they are tools with which we learn. As
Calvin and Patty construct multiple stories, they are crafting conceptual tools upon which to
envision an imaginable future with greater agency. By identifying the markers of appropriation
within these narrative frames, this analysis shows not only what Calvin is appropriating but also
how he is learning through the process of narrating his learning experiences in different contexts
of his life.
Ochs and Capps (1996) pointed out that “narrative activity provides tellers with an opportun-
ity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, pre-
sent and imagined worlds” (p. 19). Calvin and Patty negotiate the language and tools with which
to create this kind of continuity across Calvin’s experiences. Gutierrez (2016) pointed out the
importance of working with youth “to imagine new trajectories and futures and forms of agency
in learning processes for youth in vulnerable circumstances” (p. 187).
Rather than assume that teachers or researchers can do this work for youth, Gutierrez (2016)
pointed out that young people in marginalized communities need to develop as “historical actors”
—i.e., to “learn to see historically so that they can begin the process of reframing their own socio-
historical circumstance and futures as learners and agents of social change” (p. 192). Research on
this learning helps us understand:
(a) the resources and constraints of the ecologies that constitute people’s everyday lives, (b) the full range of
people’s practices understood across at least several activity systems, and (c) people’s repertoires of practice,
including the genesis of those practices. … That individuals appropriate throughout their lives as
participants in varied communities of practice, even as they navigate the contradictions and tensions, the
novelty and diversity that these different communities present. (Gutierrez, 2016, p. 192)

Although this analysis has not examined such repertoires of practice directly (as one could
using ethnographical or participatory design methods, for example), narrative analysis offers
another important perspective: the ways learners make sense of the purposes, genesis, and contra-
dictions of the practices that matter in their lives. By understanding the ways Calvin appropriates
ideas and stances from one context of his life, leveraging them for agency in other contexts, we
can better understand the ways different pedagogies matter in the genesis of his own repertoires
of practice.
This is important especially as a resource for our own reflection on our pedagogies of math
and science. Even as the interview provides Calvin and Patty an opportunity to co-develop lan-
guage for narrating his agency as a learner, it also enables us to critically reevaluate the purposes
and assumptions underlying our math and science pedagogies. Calvin’s appropriation of key
ideas, stances, and images of math and science learning from these different pedagogies enables
406 P. M. BUENROSTRO AND J. RADINSKY

us to reflect on the learning that they afford—how they might serve as resources for youth to
develop their own repertoires of practice, outside the bounds of our pedagogical assumptions.

Conclusion
Unlike the dominant STEM discourse that demands that STEM learners master predetermined
content to serve the needs of commercial, political and military elites (Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018),
critical math and science pedagogies call on marginalized youth to leverage math as a tool to
change the world, unmasking injustices in their socio-political realities. The narratives of Calvin’s
learning do not fit neatly into either of these discourses. For Calvin, math and science serve the
ends of his cherished urge to examine the mysteries of planetary orbits and the origins of the uni-
verse. His love of science becomes more vivid and attainable through the appropriation of
insights from social justice classrooms: Math and science can connect to the world, through
things you are passionate about; math can become harder-but-easier by connecting it to things
you can imagine, or see; agency comes through putting math to use for science.
Vossoughi and Vakil (2018) envisioned a more just approach to math pedagogy, in which
“student inquiries about ‘the point’ of learning particular concepts would be treated as legitimate
and essential to the shared process of wrestling with the broader question: STEM learning toward
what end?” (pp. 136–137). Calvin asks precisely this question: “What’s the point of trig?” (659).
Patty takes this question up as a moment of reflection on her own learning, and math pedagogy
more generally. We hope that this deep exploration of one learner’s appropriation of complex
ideas and stances toward math and science learning help us take up our students’ “what’s the
point” questions as invitations to restory their learning (McKamey, 2011; Sengupta-Irving et al.,
2013), together as teachers and learners—to mine with students how our pedagogies interact with
their subjectivities and contribute (or not) to their desire-based narratives, and values and pur-
poses for learning.

Acknowledgements
We give special thanks to the editors of the Special Issue—Maxine McKinney de Royston and Tesha Sengupta-
Irving—for their thoughtful and rigorous feedback and to Calvin, our participant, for sharing his experiences.

ORCID
Patricia M. Buenrostro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4414-1089
Josh Radinsky http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7952-125X

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