Erika C. Bullock

Rethinking Teaching and Learning Mathematics for Social Justice from a Critical Race Perspective

What is teaching and learning mathematics for social justice (TLMSJ)? How has TLMSJ been taken up in mathematics education—both historically and contemporarily? Along with unpacking these two central questions, another purpose of this article is to assess the current capacity and stance of TLMSJ toward addressing issues of racial injustice. We begin with an overview of TLMSJ as an epistemic perspective and introduce an analytical lens based on selected tenets of critical race theory. We then use this analytical lens to examine extant TLMSJ scholarship toward broadening the possibilities of justice-oriented scholarship in mathematics education.

Only STEM Can Save Us? Examining Race, Place, and STEM Education as Property.

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.

Intersectional Analysis in Critical Mathematics Education Research: A Response to Figure Hiding

In this chapter, I use figure hiding as a metaphor representing the processes of exclusion and suppression that critical mathematics education (CME) seeks to address. Figure hiding renders identities and modes of thought in mathematics education and mathematics education research invisible. CME has a commitment to addressing figure hiding by making visible what has been obscured and bringing to the center what has been marginalized. While the tentacles of CME research address different analytical domains, much of this work can be connected to the social isms that plague our world (e.g., sexism, racism, heterosexism, colonialism, capitalism, ableism, militarism, nationalism, religious sectarianism). However, the trend in CME research is to address these isms in silos, which does not reflect the compounded forms of oppression that many experience. I review CME studies that employ intersectionality as a way of analyzing the complexities of oppression. Intersectionality’s limited use in CME research has been for identity-based analyses. I offer intersectional analysis as a strategy to extend intersectionality’s power beyond identity toward more systemic analyses.

A Socio-spatial Framework for Urban Mathematics Education: Considering Equity, Social Justice, and the Spatial Turn

In recent years, equity- and social justice-oriented discourses in mathematics education have been working to move the field toward an understanding of mathematics education as inherently and simultaneously social and political. Critical to this movement is the development of concepts that support scholarship, policy, and practice that are oriented toward equity and social justice. In this chapter, we propose a framework that engages scholarship in mathematics education, urban education, critical geography, and urban sociology. The resulting socio-spatial framework for urban mathematics education features a visual schematic that locates mathematics teaching and learning—vis-a-vis a mathematics-instructional triad—within a system of socio-spatial considerations relevant to US urban contexts. We situate the math-instructional triad amid a three-dimensional frame. Representing the first axis, we describe established categories of social significations or urban education: urban-as-sophistication, urban-as-pathology, and urban-as-authenticity. The concepts that represent the second (spatial) axis are drawn from considerations of how space is continually constructed: empirical space, interactive-connective space, image space, and place space. The third axis concerns the various moments and perspectives that have evolved and continue to unfold in mathematics education practice, scholarship, and policy. Particularly, we draw on recent depictions of the field’s “moments”: the process-product, interpretivist-constructivist, social turn, and sociopolitical turn. Finally, we use the urban system initiatives sponsored by the National Science Foundation in the 1990s to illustrate the elements of the framework and to demonstrate how the framework can help the field to clarify the relationship between the arrangements of spatial geography and distribution of social opportunity.