Contando Historias Matématicas: Making Visible the Complexity of Mathematical Masternarratives in Storytelling

• In Event: Unforgetting Patriarchy in Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

This paper will illuminate the contradictions and tensions that become visible when we utilize patriarchy as a lens to understand the stories prospective teachers of color (self-identified Mexicanas) share about their families in a co-constructed counterspace (Solarzano et. al, 2000). Research in mathematics education has documented the need to create equitable, humanizing, and anti-racist math classrooms (Goffney et. al, 2019; Gutiérrez, R., 2013, Martin, 2013). One way to attend to these needs is to understand how masternarratives are constructed and contested across time and contexts (Nasir et al, 2013) in teacher education. These masternarratives implicitly or explicitly name forms of oppression such as racial and gender issues. For example, in “Asians are good at math” or “Boys do math”, masternarratives explicitly allude to race and gender. Yet, while we understand patriarchy as endemic to our society and a system of oppression, it is rarely accounted for and engaged with deeply in mathematics research. A conjecture as to why this is the case is that it may continue to recenter deficit and problematic views that counter justice-oriented work. Yet, not naming patriarchy and the analytical lens it offers limits the possibilities we can dream of in mathematics education.

The co-participants involved in this project were researcher (Author) and 4 PTCs who self-identified as Mexicanas. It is important to note that the women in the project had built strong bonds before the project, with an explicit goal to disrupt extractive forms of research. There was a lot of diversity within the group (immigration status, first generation, language, class), which is not typical of the teacher education workforce. The purpose of this project was to create a learning community where PTCs had opportunities to grapple with issues of race, justice, and mathematics through pláticas, deep, critical conversations. Pláticas took place over 6 months through Zoom with an iterative and intentional design process (Gutierrez, K. and Jurow, 2016).

This paper is a reinterpretation of Ines’s stories about her father and her husband in relation to the master-narratives of what is mathematics and who does mathematics that were part of my dissertation work. In the initial analysis, through Ines’s familial stories, she would amend, uphold or challenge these masternarratives, showcasing that men of color with little to no formal education are doers of mathematics that go beyond formal schooling. When reinterpreting Ines’s stories through a patriarchy lens, we make visible the contradiction of centering stories of men as women seek to co-construct spaces of safety and freedom. That is, as if educational freedom can be detangled from centering the stories of the men in her family, even when disrupting deficit frames of Latino men in society. Thus, blurring the lines between “being a good wife”, “becoming a maestra” and “being a doer of math.” Furthermore, the patriarchy lens offers an anchoring, a no-way-out, as the Mexicanas seek the freedom from a machista culture towards educational liberation that does not exist in our current schooling system.

Author

• Sandra Zuniga, San José State University