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The liberatory stances of Black women mathematics teachers

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Abstract

Black women teachers have a legacy rooted in resisting and disrupting racism and racialization in schools. Yet, stories of Black women teachers enacting their liberatory pedagogy in mathematics go untold. This study centers Black women mathematics teachers’ liberatory stances towards teaching mathematics to Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian students. I use a Black feminist lens to conduct a critical narrative study of five Black women elementary teachers that explores how their racialized mathematics experiences informed their liberatory stances of personal accountability, caring, and being a role model for students in their mathematics classrooms. These liberatory stances resisted normalizing whiteness and anti-Blackness in mathematics classrooms within teachers’ schools. Implications include learning about Black women mathematics teachers’ liberatory stances in different racialized social systems as a starting place to transform mathematics education for liberation.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Throughout the paper, the term “Black children” or “Black students” refers to Black children who were descendants of free or freed Black people of African descent, people of African origins, and African immigrants. I choose this designation because it aligns with how my research participants identified their Black of African descent and Black immigrant populations, primarily from Somalia and Eritrea.

  2. I intentionally used the term “Brown students” or “Brown people” based on what I know to be true in the USA. That the closer someone is to Blackness, in this case through overgeneralizations of skin color and race, the more likely they are to be oppressed in an anti-Black white supremacy system. In my context, this term refers to Latinx, Southeast Asians, and Indigenous people, though in still more diverse contexts the term can include more racial and ethnic groups. I use the term to signal my solidarity with dark-skinned people—from family, friends, and acquaintances to strangers—of multiple races, cultures, languages, and ethnic groups.

  3. All teacher names are pseudonyms.

  4. At the time of my study, my participants used the term “kids of color” as opposed to “Black and Brown kids” because in the US context, the terms kids, students, and people of color embodies a range of culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse people. I understand these words in my own region and my own history in the USA, and also recognize that the meaning of these terms are shifting.

  5. This statement was made in 2019, when Donald Trump was in office.

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  1. College of Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Elzena L. McVicar

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McVicar, E.L. The liberatory stances of Black women mathematics teachers. Educ Stud Math (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-023-10280-7

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