Learning and Negotiating: Latino/a Students’ Mathematics Identities in Two Algebra 1 Classrooms

• In Event: High School Students’ Identity, Positioning, and Learning in Mathematics

Abstract

According to Martin (2000), socio-historical contexts, educational experiences and individual factors, such as agency, are key to being successful in mathematics for African American youth. Further, he argued that learning mathematics is a “racialized” experience. Though much research on Latino/a students in mathematics centers on the roles of language and culture, articulation of how race plays a role in learning mathematics remains undertheorized. Identity – who a person is within a given context (Gee, 2001) - is a holistic window on student experience, and provides insight into learning processes beyond the transmission of content. In this study, I drew on Martin’s (2000, 2009a) framing of mathematics identity, sociocultural learning theories and identity research in mathematics (Wenger, 1998; Nasir & Hand, 2008; Boaler & Greeno, 2000), in conjunction with Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), to frame mathematical identity as situated at the intersection of individual students and their classroom settings, and informed by larger Discourses of race and achievement. I use the concept of identity negotiation to explore how students embrace, maintain, reject, or shift their identities over the course of the study.

Through interviews, focus groups and class observations of two Algebra 1 classes, I documented and described the mathematical identity development and ongoing identity negotiation of seven Latino/a high school students in two high school Algebra 1 classes across one academic school year. The school is part of a large urban school district in the Pacific Northwest, and was the most diverse high school in the area at the time of this study.

The findings I will discuss focus on the student’s identity development and factors that contribute to how students negotiated their identities over time. Findings include: 1) students took on a range of identities in their classrooms, and these identities are impacted by a variety of classroom resources (including proximity to important peers, teacher interactions, and the presence of bilingual instructors), 2) students were negotiating language in complex ways, even if they were proficient English speakers, and 3) while students did not talk about race as salient in their learning of mathematics, they did talk about how culture and language were linked to striving for success in school in a way that suggests the constructs of culture and language served as a proxy for race. I will discuss how this research can contribute to a new framework for understanding Latino/a mathematical identity negotiation and learning in mathematics classrooms.

Author

• Maria del Rosario Zavala, San Francisco State University