Weekly Question: How do students’ mathematical identities matter in our classrooms?

Essential Question: What does equitable, justice-oriented, and/or anti-racist mathematics learning look like?

In reading for this week, I almost felt silly having referenced gendered differences and that TikTok (which you can find here: https://www.tiktok.com/@gracie.ham/video/6864198263063448837) last week. Laurie Rubel writes "Speaking Up and Speaking Out about Gender in Mathematics" (2016) quite specifically about gender, whereas my connections to last week's Gutiérrez (2018) stretched the boundaries of what was explicitly stated in the article. But I was surprised to take the gendered question into a completely different direction in Rubel's writing. Our gendered assumptions about intelligence and experience in the classroom -- our expectations for student success -- are not the only harmful gendered narratives that get created in math class. We also have to think about the types of problems that we present to our students. For a long time, heterosexuality and the gender binary has been the norm. But even as the world around us has grown to understand gender and sexuality as spectrums, it is common to fall into a routine of reverting to tradition. It is always easier to reuse tried and true problem sets in the mathematics classroom. Understandably, many people don't like eliminating classic problems in the same way that they don't want to rename buildings or streets or tear down statues. These acts of change sometimes feel like we're erasing history or trying to rewrite it into something that it wasn't. But, also like buildings and statues, sometimes it is just time for change. The old still happened, it is still true, but now we are able to memorialize something that is more meaningful, and hopefully less racist/sexist/homophobic/etc than it was before.

So what do we do? We write new questions. Or new spins on the old questions. But we definitely stop using questions that posit only boys who marry girls and girls who marry boys and that's it, no other possible options or combinations. We represent our students in the questions we ask. Maybe on a small scale at first, but hopefully increasingly in ways that help them see math as the mirror we were dreaming about last week, instead of the window that Gracie is looking through in her TikTok.

This window and mirror analogy doesn't stop simply with the questions we are asking. The weekly question also asks specifically about student mathematical identities. I don't know that I have a full definition for mathematical identity just yet, but my working definition weaves in the place each student is in their mathematical thinking and learning. It involves the ways that students are seeing math in their worlds, the ways they are using math in their worlds. I might argue that we push the boundaries of these identities in the classroom by using what we know and building on it. The Aguirre et al (2013) chapters provided a great example of what this might look like in Mr. C. Mr. C used something he knew about his students' overall identities -- their experience with possible discriminatory discipline in the school -- and used it to create a mathematics lesson. The lesson incorporated multiple entry points, which took to their current math identities of where they are and what they know already, and used that to teach them more and grow their math identities. But beyond that, he used their overall identities and the things that they find important to build the mathematics lesson. In doing so, Mr. C was able to build their mathematical identities out in a way that wasn't just what they know about math, but it also built what they know they can use mathematics to do. The students' mathematical identities before the lesson might not have included data-driven fights for justice, but the lesson showed them that they could combine their identities as justice-fighters with their knowledge of mathematics, building a math identity that involves using math for justice.

What Mr. C was able to do in his classroom was inspiring. It's what many of us hope to be able to do for our students and our classrooms and hopefully helped his kids develop their identities in new ways. But we might not always be able to make such sweeping and meaningful connections. At the end of the day, this week reminds me that what is important is doing our best to connect the lessons we are teaching to our students' lives. Some lessons that might just mean a current trend on TikTok or a local restaurant's newest menu item. Other lessons it will be a great fight for justice that the students feel passionate about. Big or small, connections are what drive the world, and, if we let them drive mathematics, we will hopefully make school just a bit better for our kiddos and empower them with the knowledge they deserve to take on the world ahead.