Institution Identities in the Neoliberal Era: Challenging Differential Opportunities for Mathematics Learning

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

Abstract

Since the 1980s, neoliberal logics have shaped how policymakers frame and ameliorate problems in education, with mathematics education as a common target. In this empirical paper, we explore how neoliberal policies operate in the co-construction of children’s mathematical identities. Using examples from four research projects, we illustrate how participants in school mathematics education drew on or resisted policy language to narrate mathematical selves through institution-identities.
Educational policy language provides discursive resources for people to narrate stories about themselves and others, making new identities available. Since policies tend to be ameliorative, policy-rooted narratives construct students and teachers through the (real or perceived) expectations articulated in different initiatives, often positioning them at the heart of some issue (Stein, 2004). As people’s understandings of themselves and others get told through policy language, it makes available what Gee (2000) calls institution-identities: positions within an institution that are authored by its authorities. This paper demonstrates how these logics embedded in policies and their related language and practices produce new institution-identities and naturalize them, making them common sense tools for narrating the mathematical self.
We examined empirical data (fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and video recorded meetings) from four research studies in different U.S. schooling contexts. We operationalized the idea of enacting institution-identities as the moments where actors (teachers, parents, and students) in an educational system made sense of mathematics teaching and learning by narrating themselves or others via such terms. Using the construct of intertextuality (Gee, 2004), which refers to how social actors incorporate (or borrow) words from another text spoken or written, we conducted a systematic comparison across all examples, noting instances where neoliberal logics provided critical resources for people to make sense of their experiences with school mathematics.
A key finding is that participants used policy language to describe mathematics teaching and learning, providing resources for institution-identities that naturalized neoliberal logics. These, in turn, had a distorting effect on the trajectories of students’ mathematics identities. Neoliberal logics of efficiency, policy intervention, and personal responsibility were mobilized by actors (teachers, parents, and students) to locate themselves or others as mathematics learners, thus serving as a discursive resource for shaping students’ mathematics identities. Relatedly, neoliberal policies and their related logics influenced available institution-identities, shaping narratives of students’ trajectories in school-based mathematics, particularly for racially and economically marginalized populations. These narratives often exacerbated the inequality they were designed to address, creating ways for inequality to continue without visibly culpable actors.
While others have analyzed policy language as a tool for narrating the self and others (e.g. Stein, 2004), scholars have not yet linked neoliberal policies’ role in shaping educational opportunities (Baltodano, 2012), how such policies contribute to and maintain racial and economic disparities (Kohli, Pizarro, & Nevárez, 2017), and the explicit connection between policy and mathematical identities. Our work suggests a fruitful new direction for studies of mathematical identities, since mathematics has a long history of sitting at the center of U.S. policy reform.

Authors

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, Stanford University

• Ilana S. Horn, Vanderbilt University

• Rosa Chavez, Stanford University

• Sunghwan Byun, Michigan State University