Relational Care Is Noticeably Absent in Mathematics

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Racialized Feeling in Mathematics and Science Classrooms (Table 9)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to explore how harm and emotional trauma inhere in mathematics. As a form of postqualitative research, I examine a publicly posted video of a sixth grade mathematics classroom. I argue that the teacher’s attunement to noticing the student’s thinking happens in simultanaeity with a potential enactment of harm. I argue that emotional trauma often inheres in mathematics, and that disciplinary harm is perpetuated by the way that ‘ignoring the emotional impacts of your actions’ is constructed as a disciplinary signifier of mathematics.

Author

• Ezra Gouvea, Rethink Learning Labs