Latina/o Undergraduates Resist Racialized, Gendered, and Classed Spaces Through an Emerging Scholars Calculus Workshop

• In Event: Learning From Underrepresented Students’ Perspectives: Investigations by Female Mathematics Education Scholars From STEM Backgrounds

Abstract

Purpose:
Existing mathematics education research tends to fixate on Latina/o students’ negative mathematics achievement levels instead of uncovering the complexities underlying their mathematical learning processes that contribute to their success and resilience in mathematics. Despite evidence that students’ negotiations of mathematical experiences in various contexts impacts their mathematics participation and learning, little is known about Latina/o students’ perceptions of the various spaces they manage in their mathematical trajectories and how such perceptions impact their mathematics development.

Perspective:
This presentation discusses how two Latina/o undergraduate students, one male and one female, negotiated three spaces associated with a Calculus I course in an urban state university (lecture, discussion section, Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) workshop ) and how they managed the broader societal contexts in which these spaces were situated. Drawing on critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), the author discusses participants’ perceptions of these race-making, gender-making, and White spaces and how these perceptions impacted their identity development, participation, and access to math learning opportunities.
The presenter also relates her experiences growing up in a working class family and facing inequities as a result of her female status in the male dominated field of engineering and mathematics to some of the obstacles her participants faced in their mathematical trajectories.

Methods and Data Sources:
The qualitative methodology employed in this study includes multi-case study analysis (Yin, 2009), counterstorytelling methods (Delgado, 2000), and life story interviews (McAdams, 2001). Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant to construct rich descriptions of their experiences in various contexts related to their mathematics development.

Results:
The participants managed complex optimistic and pessimistic mathematical experiences in and across broader societal contexts, including cultural, racialized, gendered, and classed experiences. Negotiating experiences that aimed to limit their participation in mathematics more negatively impacted how they self-identified as math learners than how they constructed their multiple other identities (racial, gender, class). Participants’ interactions with peers in an ESP Calculus I workshop played an instrumental role in allowing them to challenge barriers that stood in the way of their mathematical success that they negotiated in various contexts, include those involving race, gender, and class. This aided the participants in constructing strengthened identities as math learners, including as Latina/o, fortifying their participation, and gaining access to mathematical learning opportunities. The participants’ participation in their traditional Calculus I lecture and discussion section courses did not have this same impact.

Scholarly Significance:
This study raises important considerations regarding the experiences that Latina/o mathematics learners may navigate, including race, gender, and class conscious self-perceptions in their mathematical pathways; definitions of group membership, including societal and self-images of what it means to “be Latina or Latino” in relation to math participation and learning; and the ways in which these images and definitions become manifested in mathematics classrooms.

Author

• Sarah Oppland-Cordell, Northeastern Illinois University