Math as Resistance: Students’ Epistemic Authority and Engagement in a Critical Mathematics Classroom

• In Event: Learning to Fight, Fighting to Learn: Secondary Student Actors Reclaiming Mathematics Through Histories of Resistance

Abstract

Objectives: This analysis examines students’ experiences taking a full-year 12th grade critical mathematics course and the ways in which students took up connective and productive disciplinary engagement (CPDE; Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2019). Specifically, the author underscores how the teacher’s pedagogy surfaced and built on students’ diverse epistemic and ontological dispositions.

Perspectives: Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving (2019) expanded Engle & Conant’s (2002) notion of productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) to build out a more generative framework–connective and productive disciplinary engagement (CPDE)--that makes visible issues of power, identity, and personhood. Their proposed framework foregrounds disciplinary engagement that draws on diverse ways of knowing and being by examining how classroom spaces afford (or negate) opportunities for students to connect their past to the present and future. The CPDE framework extends the original conceptualization of PDE by including the dimensions of epistemic heterogeneity, historicity and identity to the four foundational guiding principles of problematizing, authority, accountability, and resources. These added dimensions take into critical consideration marginalized students’ legitimate authority as intellectual thinkers and doers of mathematics, as well as their cultural and political histories as resources that should be leveraged for disciplinary learning and engagement.

Data methods: Data sources include classroom video, teacher and researcher journals, student journals and post-course student interviews, analyzed thematically using CPDE as an a priori coding framework. The analysis unearths how students’ ideas, cultural funds of knowledge, epistemologies, and ontological commitments supported their collective learning.

Results: Findings show that authority was redistributed through practices like peer dialogue, critique, and collective sensemaking, as the teacher intentionally decentered himself while maintaining a facilitative yet directive role. Mathematical uncertainty (inherent to problematization) was embraced, not avoided, with students relying on one another to navigate complex social-mathematical questions. Accountability extended beyond academic performance; students felt responsible for one another’s learning and a sense of communal obligation—to family, peers, and broader communities. Rich personal and historical resources—such as experiences of migration, economic hardship, and familial knowledge—served as powerful anchors for deep mathematical exploration.

Significance: This case offers a generative example of what CPDE can look like when aligned with strength-based and justice-oriented approaches to teaching mathematics. While not intended as a replicable model, the findings highlight key pedagogical principles—such as authentic intellectual work, student authority, and peer and community accountability—that can inform other educators and researchers. This work contributes to ongoing conversations in mathematics education about what it means to teach and learn in ways that are culturally sustaining, intellectually rigorous, and socially transformative. It underscores the need to center students as full epistemic agents whose lives and knowledge matter, not only as a foundation for deep disciplinary learning but as a matter of equity.

Author

• Patricia Buenrostro, University of Illinois at Chicago