Intellectual Safety in Mathematics: Secondary Student Perspectives from an Anti-Racist Summer Institute

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

Abstract

Objectives
This study aimed to explore how an anti-racist, scenario-based mathematics summer institute could foster intellectual safety and support secondary students, particularly BIPOC students, in reclaiming mathematics as a tool for justice. We highlight how secondary students co-constructed mathematics rooted in storytelling, real-world sociopolitical issues, and collaborative design.

Perspectives
Mathematics education has long excluded the cultural identities, lived experiences, and ways of knowing of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students. Recently, however, equity/justice scholars have attempted to shift this deficit-based narrative of exclusion, reframing math education as a tool for liberation (Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Gholson & Martin, 2014; Gutierrez, 2018; Martin, 2019). This change then calls for learning environments that (a) acknowledge and integrate the lived experiences of learners, (b) upholding academic rigor, recognizing that supporting BIPOC students in mathematics does not require lowering expectations, and (c) actively cultivate spaces where students feel valued, supported, and safe to engage with mathematical ideas.

Data and Methods
Using an ethnographic research design, we analyzed data that included 10 student interviews, daily student journals, field notes, student artifacts, and reflective memos. We conducted a thematic analysis combining priori codes from existing literature and emergent codes with three coders independently coding the data. We highlight how secondary students explored and redefined what mathematical learning and intellectual safety can look like.

Results
Students in the institute demonstrated how mathematics could be reclaimed as a powerful tool for social justice and collective transformation, showcasing its potential to address and remediate societal harms they witness or experience. Students described feeling cared about, listened to, and motivated when they could connect mathematics to issues that mattered to them, like health discrimination, racial discrimination. Their experiences showed how social relevance is actively shaped by students’ racial, cultural, and social identities.

Significance
This study contributes to ongoing efforts to reframe mathematics education as a liberatory practice. We highlight the importance of creating an intellectually safe, rigorous, and culturally grounded learning space where students can use their own agency and mathematics to guide their learning. The findings strengthen how centering students’ lived experiences, cultural identities, and historical knowledge can lead to more meaningful, justice-oriented mathematics education grounded in both personal and collective narratives.

Authors

• Jennifer Aracely Rodriguez, University of Michigan Ann Arbor

• Jennifer Randall, University of Michigan