Digital Commons Network^™

Mathematics Teaching Assistants’ Community-Building Activities During Remote Instruction, T. Royce Olarte, Damaris Hernandez, Hannali Pajela, Sarah A. Roberts

NERA Conference Proceedings 2021

The need to build community in mathematics learning spaces was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined the community-building efforts of mathematics TAs during a dynamically uncertain period and how they engaged in pandemic-sensemaking to make sense of and adapt their community-building efforts for remote instruction. We found that TAs engaged in various community-building activities through the synchronous and asynchronous interactions afforded by the design of the course (e.g., during sections, in office hours), and pandemic-sensemaking enabled them to better understand students’ challenges and adapt their efforts to attend to the challenges with building community.