Contextualizing Learner Experiences as Asset-Based Strategy in Math Learner Identity Development for Black Girls

• In Event: Black People Are Not a Monolith: Designing and Nuancing Culturally Responsive Mathematics

Abstract

The concept of identity in relation to mathematics learning continues to gain attention, as more scholarship highlights racialized and gendered narratives of math learner identity development (Andrews & Cosby, 2021; Anderson, 2020; Gholson & Martin, 2014; Joseph et al., 2019; McGee & Martin 2011). In recent scholarship, we continue to witness efforts to facilitate learning communities that empower Black girls (Anderson, 2020; Joseph et al., 2019; McGee & Martin 2011). Mathematics continues as a gatekeeper to what many posit limits economic, educational, and political opportunities from adolescence to adulthood (NCTM, 2018); a mode of gatekeeping that disproportionately impacts the experiences of minoritized youth in different learning spaces and directly impacts the development of their learner identities in relation to those contexts (Anderson, 2006; Gholson & Martin, 2014; Joseph et al., 2017).
Recognizing the implications of mathematics as a gatekeeper, this work utilizes curriculum design as a proactive, asset-based strategy for supporting and valuing Black girls as mathematics learners and members of mathematical communities. Students enter a math classroom filled with their own ideas, lived experiences, and knowledge from previous math classes and math from everyday life. To that end, asset-based strategy counters the deficit approach by centering student thinking and reasoning, which works to solidify mathematical understanding, and bolsters positive math identities (Morton et al., 2020). By centering the voices of Black girls in curricular and instructional design strategy, we continue to move past dominant ideologies void of how their intersectional experiences in the mathematics classroom differ from larger discourses (Harper & Anderson, 2020). As a complement to asset-based strategy, this work also utilizes grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and tenets of afro-futurism (Jones & Howard, 2022) as a methodological framework to document and analyze interviews from two Black girl participants interviewed during the first phase of the larger research project developing culturally responsive math nation learning modules. We were guided by two primary research questions in our analysis:
How do Black girls experience and name how they navigate ideological discourses and institutional structures unique to math learning?
What is the additional emotional labor that Black girls manage to find success in math learning environments?
Seeking to envision spaces in mathematics curriculum design that centers the futures of Black girls in naming and claiming their own mathematical agency, we offer recommendations to educators and key stakeholders in education for developing and supporting Black girl’s in their positive identities as mathematics learners— and as members of a community that develops the practices of mathematics learning. Our findings suggest that Black girls who find success and belonging in mathematics classrooms experience self-directed, positive identity development through activating their own prior knowledge, connecting social-emotional processes to cognitive learning processes, and persevering in academic environments self-deemed to be unjust for girls who look or sound like them. To improve the formal and informal mathematics learning experiences of Black girls, we must understand their unique learning experiences more fully and take action so each facet of identity mutually supports the others in developing all students’ identities as mathematics learners.

Authors

• Taryrn T.C. Brown, University of Florida
  Presenting Author

• John Grab
  Presenting Author