A Conceptual Framework for Combating Epistemic Oppression in U.S. Mathematics Education

• In Event: Advancing Equity and Excellence in Mathematics Education

Abstract

For more than a century, U.S. mathematics education has been deeply entangled in the nation’s economic, security, and warfare goals. I contend that mathematics education functions within a highly resilient colonial, White supremacist epistemology that maintains U.S. settler-colonialism. This epistemological system impedes one’s epistemic agency because the system itself prevents something from being known. Countless studies have credibly demonstrated mathematics teachers’ complicity in knowingly or unknowingly partaking in this system of oppression. I draw on Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson's (2014) theory of epistemic oppression to identify the ways in which teachers perpetrate different orders of oppression against subaltern communities and then theorize how teachers’ critical consciousness could be formed to combat epistemic oppression in mathematics teaching and learning.

Author

• Kiruba Murugaiah, Boston College