Quick and Languid: Shifting Tempos in the Learning of Mathematics

• In Event: Unforgetting Patriarchy in Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

This paper takes a fresh look at one account in my dissertation (Author, 2024) on mathematicians from social groups historically dispossessed of the practice—that of a differential equations classroom in a women’s HBCU (Historically Black College or University), where a room full of Black women and gender non-conforming students produced an instance of what I conceptualized as a “slow mathematics classroom.” In the original analysis I made a case for slowness itself as productive of learning, arguing against more pervasive ideas that quickness is necessary for successful mathematical practice. My objective here is to further complicate the very notion of a slow-fast binary in mathematics and to see how such complications might expand our understanding of its teaching and learning. Drawing on contemporary feminist new materialisms, the evolving analysis presented here is premised on troubling the dominant patriarchal dualistic imagination of the university as either fast or slow (Juelskjær & Rogowska-Stangret, 2017). In a departure from the dichotomy altogether, Juelskjær and Rogowska-Stangret argued that attending to the shifting rhythms of university life might help us make better sense of what sustains and animates it. I bring this lens to look at my data anew by considering “bodies and rhythms, their im/possibilities and their ir/regularities” and the ways that they “shift between slow and fast at an ever-changing pace” (p. 6).

Data for this session consists of video and audio recordings of a class led by Dianne, a Black woman mathematician and professor, and one of the focal participants in my dissertation study. Dianne’s classroom had 11 students that day, all of whom are Black with subjective experiences as women or as gender non-conforming individuals. The students were seated in groups of 3 or 4, and Dianne stood at the whiteboard with a marker leading the discussion at the core of the analysis here. I, as ethnographer and researcher, collected the data and took field notes. The analysis hinges on Goffman’s (1979) urging to attend to shifts in participants’ footing in interaction. “Footing” may be described in terms of bodily alignment, posture, and orientation—shifts in footing are especially generative when discerning often imperceptible changes in pacing.

I use these methods to transcribe how bodies and conversations in the episode speed up or slow down as mathematics is being collectively learnt. Importantly, I argue against the patriarchal insistence that the “pace” of an interactional space shapes the quality of mathematical learning by showing how hurried, urgent work is often accompanied by languid, labored effort when participants are engaged in mathematical sensemaking. Where my initial analysis might have submitted to the patriarchal binary of two modes of mathematical teaching and learning (fast and slow), this analysis refuses that dualism altogether, instead taking a “both, and” approach. Focusing on this mathematics classroom—led by a Black woman and made up of young students who also occupy the raced, gendered margins of the field—illuminates how mathematical work unfolds and thrives across speeds and not solely in some steady up-tempo of the patriarchal imagination.

Author

• Arundhati Velamur, New York University