Culturally Relevant Engagement in Undergraduate Mathematics

• In Event: Equity-Oriented Perspectives on Undergraduate Mathematics Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This paper introduces the term culturally relevant engagement, which describes the practice by students of color in activating their community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to meaningfully participate in STEM activities. We illustrate what culturally relevant engagement can look like in undergraduate mathematics.

The Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework shifts from the deficit perspective often used in discussing the participation of students of color in education by focusing on the resources and capitals as part of the students’ communities. Also informed by Critical Race Theory, this paper uses the methodology of composite counter-stories to highlight ways that Latinx students can reclaim stories of their experiences in higher education.

The data for this paper comes from transcripts of semi-structured interviews with five undergraduate Latinx students at a public research university classified as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. The interviews were part of a project investigating the impacts of STEM counter-spaces (Ong et al, 2019) on the participation and persistence of students of color. The interview provided a space for counter-story telling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) of students’ experience, which challenged marginalization and thus made it another counter-space. Here, we focus on the stories from Veronica (Mexican) and Lesli (Puerto Rican and Mexican American).

Veronica’s story highlights the activation of linguistic capital to establish relationships with instructors, TAs, and study groups. Attending office hours and selecting study groups were motivated by the “connection,” or “more flow conversation” through speaking Spanish. The story also shows that speaking Spanish was not just a means to communicate for Veronica. It was also a way for her to meaningfully connect to the emerging community to which she felt connected.

Lesli’s story showcases how she leveraged resistance capital to gain entry into a high-status study group in calculus. Her story showcases the prejudice against women of color in STEM, but also how she drew from her past experiences of being dismissed to manage the group’s initial skepticism of her. Lesli credited her success to her entry into what her mother called, “the mafia,” and her ongoing work with them and the friendship she developed in the group.

The significance of this work lies in our focus on describing the processes by which students of color activate their CCW to engage in important STEM activities (see also discussion about possession and activation of cultural capital in Rios-Aguilar et al, 2011). The few studies that have applied the CCW framework in undergraduate STEM have primarily focused on identifying different forms of capital as motivation for students in pursuing and persisting in their education (e.g., Dika et al., 2018; Samuelson & Litzler, 2016). Resistance and linguistic capital are also rarely discussed in the literature. Our paper highlights successful practices that allow students of color to pursue a STEM degree without leaving their identities and communities behind for the sake of STEM assimilation.

Authors

• Aditya P. Adiredja, The University of Arizona

• Jocelyn Noelle Rios, University of Arizona