When Girl is Not the Problem and Gender Analysis is Not the Only Solution

• In Event: Unforgetting Patriarchy in Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

This paper is a reinterpretation of a comparative case study published in Race, Ethnicity & Education (Author & Colleague, 2019), concerning the experiences of two racially minoritized girls in different STEM learning environments (an Algebra classroom and a STEAM-based afterschool program). Although the girls were separated by time, place, age, and social histories, the original analysis showed how the girls’ meaning making about disciplinary learning contested national discourses of racial capitalism/neoliberalism in STEM education (PCAST, 2010; Melamed, 2011; Vossoughi & Vakil, 2018) and the representational and respectability politics that follow (Higginbotham, 1993; Nieto, 2009). That is, while national STEM discourses seek to acquire more “girls” and “students of color,” within a larger project of U.S. global and technological hegemony, the sensibilities and perspective grown in their immigrant families and in their experiences of the learning environments, reveal a different set of logics: logics that center family, dignity, and joy in learning. The new analysis focuses on the ninth-grade Muslim Palestinian student in the original paper. She and her classmates were as part of an ethnographic case study of their teacher’s use of an established groupwork-based, equity-oriented pedagogy (Complex Instruction).The analysis drew on fieldnotes, student and teacher interviews, and sociometric network surveys wherein students reflected on their peers.

This reinterpretation takes patriarchy as an analytic lens to identify what was erased or under-theorized about her experiences in the original analysis. The point is not that one analysis is more “true” than another. Rather, I explore what new insights and lines of inquiry become available when the analysis of her mathematics learning and experiences surface the ideational and material ways the patriarchal order circulated in the class and her family, reaching into macro-histories of mathematics, schooling, and the world. In particular, this analysis finds the congruities and incongruities of the student’s worldview from home (her mother returning to college after raising children; her expectation of marriage after high school) and of school (peer/group relations, teacher authority, the nature and purpose of mathematics). Doing so expands the scope of where math education research can intervene to disrupt the normalization of patriarchy and move mathematics teaching, learning, and research toward a future that unseats the patriarchal logics that have historically shaped them.

Author

• Tesha Sengupta-Irving, University of California - Berkeley