Exploring Black Girl Livingness in Mathematics Through Arts-based Methods

• In Event: Intersectional Perspectives and Transformative Educational Practices of Girls and Women of Color

Abstract

Black girl learners in mathematics face barriers from their gendered and racialized identities (Cosby, 2020; Gholson, 2016; Joseph et al., 2019). Yet, Black girls are often silenced in research discourses and even in pop culture artifacts. For example, Darragh (2018) found in her analysis of young adult novels that while both genders were portrayed as good at math, the representation was skewed towards White, upper-class girls.
We used arts-informed practices to explore how Black girls reflect on their past and envision a present and future mathematics learning space within and outside colonial logics. The arts present opportunities to engage in gaze practices where Black girls can reflect on how they see themselves and how they are seen while developing “counter gaze” practices (Campt, 2021). Employing arts-informed methods is a decolonizing act insofar as it pushes against the logical structure of mathematics to embrace the “accumulative textures” (McKittrick, 2021) of stories using creative arts that affirm Black livingness through embodied practices.
We partnered with three Black girls in the Greater Toronto Area over nine weeks consisting of two hour sessions. Mariam was in grade 9 at a French immersion school while Zainab and Nadia were both in grade 10 at a diverse school. The research project was divided into three segments: Math & Me focused on reflecting on their experience as mathematics students in high school; Math and Media approached the question of the role the media played in constructing Black youth identity relating to Math; Math & Me Part 2 circled back to where students began when they explored their relationship to math. This segment focused on reimaging and rebuilding liberatory futures in Maths.
The girls were given the opportunity to story their experiences as a way to boost their imaginations to consider how they are both seen as math students by the media and others and how they internalize or reject this gaze. Through this process with the girls, we noticed an initial hesitation in speaking about their lived experiences as math students. The art activities they engaged in supported the storying process because it allowed for the nuances of their experiences to be seen visually and then expressed verbally.
We conducted individual interviews two months after and the interviews revealed how the arts-based methods supported participant’s ability to express their experiences as well as connect to their gaze work. One of the gaze work activities that most participants reflected on involved using an image of themselves that generated two views of themselves at once. This accordion style optical illusion offered the girls ways to show and tell the often conflicting experiences of how they are seen and how they want to be seen. Similar to the media and television exploration the girls developed their expression to a greater degree through this activity because it allowed them to “name their reality” (Delgado, 1989) in ways that support deep sensing and telling (O’Neill & Hubbard, 2010). Exploring and describing “hard to name” experiences supported the Black girls’ livingness practices in mathematics education.

Authors

• Molade Osibodu, York University

• Myrtle Sodhi, York University