Understanding Black Girls’ Co-construction of Sociomathematical Support through Relationships, Friendships, and Networks

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

Abstract

Children and adolescents’ interactions and relations with their peers, teachers, and parents have long been considered integral to their social, emotional, and cognitive development. Only within the last twenty years—during the social turn—have children and adolescents’ social lives gained considerable traction in education research concerning the acquisition of subject matter content (Lerman, 2000), like mathematics. Learning—meaning-making, reasoning, and thinking—is now well-understood as the product of social interaction and the consequent relationships children develop with their teachers, classmates, and subject matter. By and large, education studies in the social turn have focused primarily on individuals (their characteristics and identities) or interactions between individuals. Other levels of complexity in children’s social experiences, for example, longer-term, multivalent relationships— such as friendships or aggregate relationships—found in informal groups and social networks, have largely been ignored (Cairns, Xie, & Leung, 1998). This is especially true for Black girls and women, who are often depicted and discursively constructed as strong, independent, solitary figures in popular culture and the media (Anyiwo et al., 2018), i.e., without the need for relational ties. During the past five years, we have followed two small cohorts of academically-focused Black youth in a midwestern urban context enrolled in a college-bridge program starting in their 8th-grade year. Our study aims to learn about the racialized and gendered realities of mathematics identity development by analyzing the formation of Black youths’ social networks and relationships. The focus of this paper explores Black girls' mathematical social development with a particular focus on their friendships, social groups, and social networks.
Using longitudinal social network analysis, we map the trajectories of Black-girl mathematics learners from middle school to high school. We primarily rely on ethnographic interviews to learn about the girls’ daily experiences in school, broadly and specifically in their mathematics classrooms. We have annually collected structural data relating to youth’s social networks from an egocentric perspective, including the presence and strength of interrelations between members in each social network. The networks are constructed from name generator interview questions across five domains: Family, Friends & Neighbors, Relatives, School, and Formal Contacts. We have developed rich descriptions of these Black girls’ networks using qualitative and quantitative analysis, including their structure, composition, and the respective value of relational ties. Our findings illustrate the social networks of ten high-achieving Black girls and describe how their relationships with friends and family provide sociomathematical support and resources in navigating educational systems and spaces like the mathematics classroom. In particular, we report on the volatility of or shifts in Black girls’ social networks (typically characterized as social instability) as an integral feature of Black girls’ identity development and achievement. In addition to contributing to the paucity of research on Black girls’ friendships and relationships, this paper empirically establishes the importance of relationships, specifically the structure of Black girls’ relationships, to mathematics learning and development.

Authors

• Maisie L. Gholson, University of Michigan

• Erin Nicole Cox, University of Michigan