Grounded, Not Bounded: Engagements With Critical Numeracy

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Education in Vygotsky’s and Sociocultural Approaches: Developing Knowledge on the Ground (Table 18)

Abstract

During a time where innumerable decisions, policies, and practices in education are activated by “the numbers” or “data”, it seems important to ask what do numbers and groupings, often in the form of categories, mean for us? Who are “the us” we organize with? Using a framework of critical numeracy with elementary educators, I explore creative curricular practices that disrupt conceptions in which numbers and static categories are often used to “objectively” reproduce and reify hierarchies. An approach of critical numeracy can prompt questions into meanings ascribed to numbers and unearth concerns of what purpose can we utilize and learn with numbers in and beyond a discipline of mathematics? This paper offers critical reflections from elementary educators regarding their engagement with numbers, processes of becoming, rehumanizing mathematics (Gutierrez and Goffney, 2018) practices and opposing racial capitalism.

I forward that numeracy is a broad activity in society and extend that critical numeracy is a social activity embedded in historically derived social relations, integrating math, numbers, and ways of knowing-being-doing. This conversation connects with and builds from the work of many critical mathematics education scholars whose political commitments are to rehumanize mathematical practices and oppose racial capitalism (Martin, 2013, Gutiérrez and Goffney, 2018, Skovsmose, 2012, Gholson, 2016, Kokka, 2020, Bullock and Meiners, 2019). Further, I connect this expansive framework to knowing with notions of learning — transformative process through activity and doing (Stetsenko, 2016, Barwell, 2016, Roth, 2012). Critical engagements with numeracy can function to disrupt taken-for-granted practices in mathematics education and numeracy (Skovsmose, 2011, de Freitas & Dixon-Roman, 2017), interrogating what is Real, how we come to know, and what is Human.

In this paper, I share ways four educators disrupt taken-for-granted conceptions in which numbers and static categories have been used to “objectively” reproduce and reify hierarchies. We engaged in a collaborative process of co-constructing meaning to address ways to disrupt hegemonic practices reifying knower and learner. This research process broke away from the "expert" (researchers) and "non-expert" (participants) to co-construct meaning together (Stetsenko, 2016). My analytical approach draws from live methods as a means to oppose “audit culture”, or modes of measuring, commodification and establishing value (Back & Puwar, 2012). Relatedly, I connect with an analytic practice of refusal as a way to unsettle reifications of social processes to provide insight towards rehumanizing practices (Tuck & Yang, 2014). I place into conversation stories from educators with ideological histories and “theories that enable us to radically re-think, re-describe, re-imagine social dynamics” (Back & Puwar, 2012, p.8) in context and processes of teaching and learning.

This research spotlights branching deviations from existing practices amongst educators regarding the construction and practice of numeracy in schools. While data and stories do not speak for themselves, this piece shares emergent practices and enactments of agency that accompany critical numeracy. Learning from these dynamics, particularly with activist-oriented educators, we can deepen insights to connect to transformative activities in community.

Author

• Atasi Das, Lehman College - CUNY