Moving Beyond Student-Centered Practices: Fostering Black Girls' Transformative Experiences With Mathematics

• In Event: Confronting the Mathematics Struggle for Girls of Color in Public Schools: Transformative Experiences

Abstract

We are living in a time where our society is experiencing racial politics that are intersectional, in which there are conscious efforts by marginalized groups and their accomplices to not only bring to the light racial, gendered, and class experiences in society, but to also challenge and disrupt interlocking systems of oppression. In recent years, millions of dollars have been invested to specifically focus on Black girls’ and women’s experiences in society and education (Author, in press). On March 29, 2016, the NoVo Foundation announced the largest financial contribution ever made ($90 million) by a private foundation to address the structural inequalities facing girls and young women of color in the United States (NoVo Foundation, 2016). One of the complexities of naming and identifying racial politics in mathematics includes the perceived, stereotyped attributes of Black girls, such as being loud or assertive, running orthogonal to White femininity (Harris-Perry, 2011), but running parallel to masculine attributes associated with success and participation in mathematics (Gholson, 2016).

In this paper, we build on our previous work around Black girls’ success in one high school mathematics classroom (Authors, 2015; 2016). We feature an analysis of the teacher’s interviews in order to unpack what fostered her Black girls’ successes in mathematics. We coded her interviews for how she talked about her students and how she described her classroom practices. Our research focused on the following questions:
1. How did this teacher frame her perceptions of teaching and learning?
2. How did those perceptions intersect with her classroom practices to effectively mediate Black girls’ experiences with competence in mathematics?

We first found that the teacher fought traditional narratives about her Black girls. She pushed against society’s traditional interpretations of Black girls as “loud” or likely to be disciplined in school. Instead, she identified her students’ traits as learning assets—asserting “these girls are my leaders,” and describing them as students who can admit and learn from being wrong, asking generative questions, and getting conversations started. Across our work with her, the teacher consistently positioned her Black girls as valuable mathematicians.

We also found that while the teacher knew that her students, taking Algebra I as freshman, were behind many of their peers taking Geometry and Algebra II, she still framed all of her students as having access to do challenging mathematics. She said, “I believe they can do Algebra without knowing integer operations or without knowing multiplication facts. You can still access Algebra. You just have to have the confidence to figure out your procedure that's going to work for you…” Overall, our analysis finds that the teacher’s pedagogy was inclusive (Authors, under review; Tuitt, 2003; Tuitt, Haynes, & Stewart, 2016). That is to say, she valued her Black girls’ intersectional identities as central to teaching and learning. Although she believed that mathematics was a gatekeeper course, she provided her students with access to Algebra. Supporting mathematics teachers in the development of asset-based thinking can contribute to transforming the lives of girls of color.

Authors

• Teresa Kathleen Dunleavy, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College

• Nicole Michelle Joseph, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College