(Re)imagining Mathematical Identities: Positioning, Positionality, and Dispositions in Mathematics Education Research

• In Event: 18.049 - Advancing Methods for Studying Social Identities in Mathematics Education: New Possibilities and Perspectives

Abstract

Prior research attests to the ways in which school mathematics invites categorical declarations such as “correct or incorrect” and “smart or dumb” to describe both ideas and, by extension, people. Such categorical declarations frequently map onto notions of whiteness, dominant masculinity and elitism (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011; Leyva, 2017; Martin, 2013; Mendick, 2006; Shah & Leonardo, 2016). Without care, a consequence of this reductive view is that mathematical identities can also become erroneously flattened into categorical declarations of who children are and are becoming (e.g., “good at math” or “struggler”). Such declarations overlook the significant role of place, time, interaction and activity as shaping mathematics identities and yet, are ripe for harvest in the context of schools. Thus, we argue that “good mathematics identity research” with racially minoritized children would reckon with school mathematics as white, normative institutional space, while also striving for a more expansive understanding of mathematics itself. And yet, as we describe, few studies take such a stance in the study of mathematics identity in schools.
Drawing primarily on sociocultural theories of identity that center the situated, relational, and sociohistoric nature of identity as a phenomenon, this paper explores the affordances and constraints of studying mathematics identities of minoritized children in schools. The purpose of the paper is to extend the boundaries of mathematics identity research both theoretically and methodologically, and to elevate the importance of researchers’ dispositions in engaging this work.
The paper begins as a critical literature review of mathematics education research over the past twenty years that involve racially minoritized school-aged youth, and that made explicit claims about identity based on empirical study. We argue this literature can be described as reflecting one of three main foci: micro-identity research with a focus on individuals, macro-identity research with a focus on structural inequality, and macro-micro identity research that seeks to map talk, interaction and activity in the everyday to structural inequality. Based on our review, it becomes clear that any attempt to reimagine children’s mathematical identities beyond the “white gaze” (Yancy, 2016) of normative schooling practices, researchers must reach for new theoretical and methodological tools that would allow them to see and interpret anew. Among these tools, we offer three specific ideas: de-normalization of whiteness in knowledge produced about mathematics identities; use of epistemic heterogeneity in mathematics education as a gateway for understanding multiplicity in mathematical identities; and, extending dominant (sociocultural) theories of identity or seeking theories anew. Following an extended discussion of each idea, we turn our attention to the significance of political clarity on the part of researchers, and propose researcher-centered and child-centered principles for future work. The significance of this analysis is perhaps most vivid here: through an analytic description of the promise and perils of prior research, we build a new foundation of anti-bias axioms and frameworks for the research by which the field can, collectively, imagine and realize a new wave of mathematics identity research worthy of the children it endeavors to describe.

Authors

• Maxine McKinney de Royston, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Vanderbilt University

• Missy D. Cosby, Michigan State University