Telling Black Girl Mathematics Learners' Stories: Poststructural Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Issa Methodology

• In Event: Accepting the Responsibility to Examine and Innovate With Frameworks Used in Education Research

Abstract

Narratives about Black girls and women circulate in society leading to material consequences for their lives. These narratives, through controlling images, have permeated Black women’s lived experiences ranging from beauty, to relationships, on through to mothering and who they can be professionally. These are all intimately tied to Black women’s position in society at the intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality (Collins, 2009; Harris, 2015; Harris-Perry, 2011). Many have shown the deleterious ways these narratives have impacted the schooling experiences of Black girls (i.e. Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Evans-Winters, 2011; Morris, 2014). As a Black woman with a mathematics degree who has taught high school mathematics for twenty years, I wondered how these narratives have permeated the lives of Black college girls learning mathematics.
In mathematics education research, two studies use a poststructural approach interrogating sociohistorical narratives in mathematics learning. Stinson (2013) found these narratives present in the mathematics learning experiences of young Black men while Shah (2017) investigated the role of racial narratives present in high school mathematics classrooms finding that the conversational narratives were ripe with connections to discourses of racial hierarchy in mathematics ability. These studies pushed my thinking about the role of narratives in the mathematical learning lives of Black girls though the framings used were insufficient to analytically capture the Black girls’ narratives. A poststructural approach, alone, lacked the meaningful attention to issues at the intersection of race and gender specific to Black girls.
Grounding this qualitative inquiry in a Black feminist perspective, the approach to this study allowed for the investigation of the narratives offered by Black women undergraduates throughout a semester-long mathematics course attending to how these narratives and those of mathematics learning are present and interact. Inspired by the HBO television series Insecure (Rae, 2016), I introduced a new methodology called “Issa methodology” which privileges Black girl ways of knowing and articulating. This methodology was used to investigate the dialectic between personal narratives of mathematics learning and controlling images. Using WhatsApp voice notes, the seven undergraduates shared a total of 50 personal narratives about their mathematics learning experiences throughout the semester.
The conceptual framing includes constructs like discourse, narratives, controlling images, and personal narratives and the relationship between them. Poststructural Race Theory (PRT) (Shah & Leonardo, 2016), offers a framework for analyzing race by examining how narratives about racial groups exercise racial power (Shah & Leonardo, 2016; Shah, 2019). Considering my interest at the intersection of race and gender, I use controlling images from Black Feminist Thought (BFT) (Collins, 2009) to extend PRT to include gendered-racialized narratives. I put forth an extended version of PRT to analyze how controlling images of Black women both position them across spaces including mathematics learning spaces and their sense-making, as a result. In this session, I share the results of utilizing such framing and the responsibility felt in creating it to honor the experiences of the Black girls sharing their stories with us, the educational research community.

Author

• Missy D. Cosby, Michigan State University