Developing Tools of Resistance: A People's Numeracy

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 8

Abstract

In our current educational climate, entrenched in philanthrocapitalism (Umphrey, 2011), a connection can be made between the institution of education and a global political economic system which reproduces and deepens inequality (Bowles & Gintis, 2011). In particular, we can examine the imposing discipline of mathematics. In The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, Andrew Hacker (2016) interrogates the relevance of teaching high level mathematics, such as Calculus and Algebra II, in high school curriculum. The myth, according to Hacker, is that math education is the key to answering the national productivity and innovation “problem”. Math education, in a larger push for STEM, is posed as one solution to the “problem” of productivity, innovation, and for the advancement of a nation. However, measures of productivity and innovation are essentially the interests of transnational capital (Spring, 2015). To this end, corporate and government alliances have proposed pathways to increase the number of STEM graduates. Yet, as Spring (2015) asserts many graduates are unable to attain secure employment calling into question the apparent shortage of innovative technologically savvy workers. This paper makes the claim that we can oppose a math education that is driven by the interests of transnational capital with a critical transdisciplinary approach to mathematics.

This paper develops an emerging theory and praxis for critical numeracy; the learning, teaching, organizing and resisting around the production and discourse of numbers (Skovmose, 2012). Drawing from critical mathematics (Skovmose, 2012), critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000), and ethnomathematics (Frankenstein and Powell, 1997), this paper situates critical numeracy and math education within socio-cultural literature while attending to political engagements of teaching and learning mathematics. Historically, numbers have been conceptualized to count, track, categorize, measure, differentiate humans, living things, and the environment in diverse ways globally (Powell & Frankenstein, 1997). While numbers have been used to describe aspects of nature and reality (i.e. the population of a certain endangered species or a student’s SAT score), mathematics has been presumed to be natural and thus politically neutral. However, I pose that math, as a language of abstracting patterns and relationships, is historically constructed and indicative of political relationships. This paper builds a theoretical foundation to investigate the dialectical relationships are embedded in reality and numbers that surround us, realities that are grounded within specific, historically derived, social relations. The paper places the theoretical foundation of critical numeracy within ongoing struggles in the development of math education in the United States and STEM more broadly.

Author

• Atasi Das, The Graduate Center, CUNY