Being an Immigrant, African, and Black Youth in Secondary Mathematics

• In Event: Black and Brown Immigrant Youth Constructing and Negotiating Identity in Canada and the United States

Abstract

Mathematics has been shown to serve as a gatekeeping subject for learners especially minoritized and underserved populations in racialized contexts (Martin et al., 2017; Osibodu, 2021). However, little research has explored how immigrant, African, and Black students - an increasingly growing group in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Ontario, Canada - experience their mathematics learning and how their mathematics identities are shaped as a result of belonging to these multiple groups. This study builds on existing scholarship that explores Black students’ mathematics identities and experience while also adding the nuance of contending how they might grapple with sociopolitical issues given these multiple salient identities.
The study is informed by decoloniality (Chilisa, 2011; Dei & Simmons, 2012; Mignolo, 2018) as it considers how the colonized Other conceives of their mathematics selves outside of colonial logics. A decolonial framing helps to assess the role of power and identity as well without limiting the focus of exploring a learner’s mathematics experience to achievement (Gutiérrez, 2012). The study is also guided by Watson & Knight-Manuel’s (2020) theorizing of the Black immigrant body which seeks to make visible Black immigrants and their multiple ways of being and knowing.
The data generated for this study consisted of interviews, an identity card sort, and a focus group with 6 self-identifying Black, African, and immigrant youth in the GTA. In the identity card sort, I asked the youth to self-select three of their salient sociopolitical identity markers (e.g. gender, sexual orientation) in addition to their race and ethnicity resulting in five identity markers. I then asked them to place the saliency of these five identity markers ranking at school, at home, in their favorite class, and in mathematics class.
The analysis showed that the youth view their Black identity more salient than their ethnicity(e.g. Being Nigerian) at school and in mathematics class because as one youth indicated, peers do not know she is Nigerian until they talk to her. Most of the youth admitted that because of their Blackness, they felt they needed to prove their mathematics prowess to their peers before they are seen as capable in mathematics. Despite the challenges the youth face in their mathematics classes, they felt the need to persevere because they believed being in Canada still holds more advantages than the countries their guardians emigrated from. Humanizing the Black immigrant body thus complicates these findings as it contends with the intricacy of holding space not only to be Black, but to be an African immigrant, while also grappling with colonial logics particularly in the context of doing mathematics. An important implication of this work examines what it means to bring contexts around social issues and social justice into mathematics classrooms that serve as a mirror to learners’ lived experience in all of its plurality to make space for Black immigrant youth to draw on contexts that allow them to display their full diasporic selves.

Author

• Molade Osibodu, York University
  Presenting Author