Complex Instruction (Cohen & Lotan, 2014) is a groupwork pedagogy aimed at making classrooms equitable. The notion of status is at the core of this pedagogy and guides how teachers ought to respond to inequitable groupwork. In this dissertation study, I consider how the concept of status (from Expectation States Theory) is applied within mathematics education. In doing so I consider how status is used in the mathematics education research and teacher-practitioner literature, as well as how prospective secondary mathematics teachers' used the notion of status to make sense of small groupwork in their student teaching placements. This study was guided by the following research questions: (a) How has status become an object that explains groupwork processes? and (b) How do prospective teachers use status to make sense of groupwork? To answer these questions, I developed a theoretical framework that explains how kinds of people are made up. Hacking's (1986) notion of human kinds plays a central role to understand the social construction of low status and high status students. I also draw on Foucault's (1980) notion of power/knowledge discourses to explain how systems of thinking, such as Complex Instruction, can be legitimized by institutions such as teacher preparation; and how scientific discourses contribute to the recognition of certain kinds of individuals. These ideas are complemented with Goffman's (1967) notion of interaction rituals to explain how being recognized as a certain kind influences individuals' interactions in certain settings. I generated data from a methods course for secondary mathematics teachers. As a course assignment, the prospective teachers implemented aspects of Complex Instruction in their student teaching placement and then participated in reflective conversations with their student-teaching peers. I analyzed the framing (Goffman, 1974) of the stories that were told by the prospective teachers. The analysis revealed that Complex Instruction acted as an authoritative discourse which created a system of reasoning where status was recognized as a way of being (rather than as a function of the group members' interactions). More specifically, I demonstrate how the notion of the notion of status was coordinated with students' characteristics and mathematically histories to explain students' interactions. Overall, I argue that the discourses of Complex Instruction may undermine its own equity-oriented goals. I discuss the implications of thinking about low status and high status kinds of students in which students are once again ranked among social and mathematical dimensions. I discuss implications for mathematics teacher educators when teaching about Complex Instruction.
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