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Interrogating the equity promise for Black immigrant students in reformed mathematics classrooms

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Abstract

As increasing numbers of Black immigrant students attend schools in Chile, we examine classroom practices to consider the limits of the mathematics education equity promise for this student population. We focus on the practices of a third-grade teacher who participated in professional development for enhancing reform-based mathematics teaching in a racially diverse classroom. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s approach to race, our analysis shows how two technologies of race-power fabricate the Black immigrant child as an uneducable and impossible mathematics learner. We contend that rather than enhancing the inclusion of Black immigrant students, reform-based mathematics teaching might maintain and reinforce racial hierarchies of mathematics ability.

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Notes

  1. Here, we adopt Weheliye’s (2014) definition of racialization as an “ongoing sets of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west” (p. 3).

  2. Scholars have incorporated approaches to race from a discourse perspective. For example, Shah (2017) introduces the notion of racial narratives as stories circulating in society regarding (1) the supposed characteristics and behaviors of racialized groups and (2) the significance of race in particular contexts. Shah argues that racial narratives broaden claims about race by operating at a larger scale than stereotypes. These claims (or meanings) can have significant consequences in positioning racialized individuals.

  3. Official data on Black immigrant students in Chilean educational institutions is lacking. Existing information on immigrant children pertains to their country of origin, but data on racial self-identification is not available.

  4. The teacher’s and students’ names are pseudonyms.

  5. In this paper, we use the expression “Chilean” to refer to the “(modern, white, urban) national identity…constructed around a biological-culturalist imaginary that assumes the ‘salience’ and superiority of white colonization, assimilating and ‘diluting’ racial ancestry (backward, rural, indigenous) through interracial marriage, resulting in an increasing homogeneity of the white population” (Webb & Radcliffe, 2016, p. 20). We also use “Black immigrant” to refer to Black children and adults not born in Chile; “Black immigrant” is a distinct racial category that allows for the recognition and acknowledgement of the historical presence of Black and Afro Chileans in the country despite the dominant racial ideology that has held the opposite.

  6. Pākehā refers to a white New Zealander.

  7. In Chile, the word to name the Afro-cuban rhythm “mambo” is used colloquially to express disorder and chaos.

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Funding

This work was supported by PIA/ANID under Grant FB0003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Catholic University of Temuco, Temuco, Chile

    Luz Valoyes-Chávez

  2. Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Lisa Darragh

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  1. Luz Valoyes-Chávez
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Correspondence to Luz Valoyes-Chávez.

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Valoyes-Chávez, L., Darragh, L. Interrogating the equity promise for Black immigrant students in reformed mathematics classrooms. Educ Stud Math (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-024-10314-8

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