Pláticas Across Terrains: Navigating Institutional Whiteness in Mathematics Education

• In Event: Trenzando Chicana Latina Feminist Perspectives into Mathematics Education

Abstract

This paper examines the methodological design of a qualitative study that centers experiences of Latine mathematics majors across institutional contexts to investigate how systemic whiteness is institutionalized in mathematics departments. Framed by CLF epistemologies, the study engages pláticas as a methodological approach, disrupting dominant research traditions that privilege neutrality, disembodiment, and abstraction.
Mathematics is often positioned as a universal and apolitical discipline, which has left the field lagging behind others in addressing systemic oppression and failing to meaningfully support Black, Indigenous, and Latine students (Gutiérrez, 2017). Within this context, CLF epistemologies offer an urgent and necessary intervention. Engaging in pláticas, a cultural practice of conversation which are grounded in relationality, memory, and community (Delgado Bernal, 1998, 2020; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), offers a transformative methodological approach that challenges the regulatory power of whiteness in mathematics (Battey & Leyva, 2016; Martin, 2015).
This methodological design is structured around two interconnected layers of pláticas: one grounded in a longstanding friendship and shared experience, and another foregrounding place-based memories from participants who were recruited for the study. I engaged in the first set of pláticas with three fellow Latine mathematics educators whom I developed close friendships during our mathematics studies at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a Chicana mathematics scholar having recently attended a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), I returned to these friends because the collaborative and communal positioning of mathematics at the HSI stood in sharp contrast to the isolating norms I encountered at the PWI. These initial pláticas provided the ethical and epistemological grounding for the walking pláticas that followed. Conducted with Latine mathematics majors who have attended both a HSI and a PWI, these walking pláticas invite participants to move through the physical spaces where their mathematical experiences occurred to “center the body’s connection to place and its memories of oppression and resistance” (Gaxiola Serrano, 2023, p. 1652). Through this method, Latines “unearth how as historically oppressed communities, we resist and create spaces, both socially and materially, that draw upon our epistemic lineage of survival, joy, and community building” (p. 1650). By attending to the spatial and sensory elements of campus, walking pláticas foreground how whiteness is not only ideological but materially embedded in institutional environments. The comparative design sheds light on how whiteness is enacted and contested across institutional contexts. Initial findings reveal peer friendships, not faculty, as the primary source of meaningful mentorship; an insight often overlooked in existing literature (Roe et al., 2024).
Together, the two layers of pláticas constitute a methodological commitment to co-theorizing and a refusal of detached or extractive inquiry. The pláticas with my friends offer an ethical foundation from which to engage others, affirming that research must be guided by the communities we work alongside. Returning to community before expanding outward reflects a stance of care, trust, and relational responsibility. This study’s methodological design invites researchers to consider methodology as an ethical practice that centers knowledge wholistically, inclusive of the brown body and the ancestral histories of oppression and resistance it carries.

Author

• Sabrina Zarza, Michigan State University