Math Class is Like Flipping Tortillas: A Latina’s Embodied Mathematics

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring issues of justice and identity in the mathematics classroom

Abstract

This paper centers on a middle-school Chicana, Xochitl, to illustrate how Chicana feminist methodologies can create the capacity to understand how Latinas make sense of their emotional and embodied experiences learning mathematics. Xochitl tells a story about how learning math is like flipping hot tortillas, as well as another story how learning mathematics as like being on an emotional slide. We follow this story from the classroom, to an interview, to a plática, as she explores this metaphor to make sense of her mathematical experience through embodied, culturally situated and emotional expression. We contend that Chicana feminist methodologies offer ways of reimagining mathematical futures that prioritize emotions, the body, and the relationships that connect mathematics spaces with cultural lived experiences.

Authors

• Marilyn Castro, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Rachel Lambert, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Rebeca Mireles-Rios, University of California - Santa Barbara