Gender research in mathematics education has experienced methodological and theoretical shifts over the past 45 years. Although achievement studies have used assessment tools to explore and subsequently challenge the assumption of male superiority on mathematics assessments, research on participation has unpacked these studies' sex-based achievement comparisons by exploring the masculinization of mathematics through qualitative methods. This article offers a review of gender research in mathematics education with analysis of its findings as well as conceptual and empirical contributions. Current understanding of mathematics as a gendered space, however, can be further broadened through intersectional analyses of gender and its interplay with other identities (e.g., race or ethnicity, class). Implications for future gender research, particularly the adoption of intersectionality theory, are raised to inform more nuanced analyses.
This article proposes and employs a framework that characterizes mathematics education as a white, patriarchal space to analyze undergraduate Black women’s narratives of experience in navigating P–16 mathematics education. The framework guided a counter-storytelling analysis that captured variation in Black women’s experiences of within-group tensions—a function of internalized racial-gendered ideologies and normalized structural inequities in mathematics education. Findings revealed variation in Black women’s resilience through coping strategies for managing such within-group tensions. This analysis advances equity-oriented efforts beyond increasing Black women’s representation and retention by challenging the racialized-gendered culture of mathematics. Implications for educational practice and research include ways to disrupt P–16 mathematics education as a white, patriarchal space and broaden within-group solidarity, including Sisterhood among Black women.
In this article, the authors provide a framework for understanding whiteness in mathematics education. While whiteness is receiving more attention in the broader education literature, only a handful of scholars address whiteness in mathematics education in any form. This lack of attention to whiteness leaves it invisible and neutral in documenting mathematics as a racialized space. Naming White institutional spaces, as well as the mechanisms that oppress students, can provide those who work in the field of mathematics education with specific ideas about combatting these racist structures. The framework developed and presented here illustrates three dimensions of White institutional space--institutional, labor, and identity--that are intended to support mathematics educators in two ways: (a) systematically documenting how whiteness subjugates historically marginalized students of color and their agency in resisting this oppression, and (b) making visible the ways in which whiteness impacts White students to reproduce racial privilege.
While research has consistently shown the positive effects of having a teacher of the same race on various student outcomes, the literature has not examined how racial match affects the everyday interactions within classrooms. This research article by Dan Battey, Luis A. Leyva, Immanuel Williams, Victoria A. Belizario, Rachel Greco, and Roshni Shah addresses this underexplored area by documenting relational interactions in classrooms to find one mechanism that could be producing racialized effects on learning. Using a dataset from a study of twenty-five mathematics classrooms across predominantly white and black US middle schools, they examine the quality of relational interactions when teachers and students are racially matched and mismatched, as well as the effects on student achievement in mathematics. Their analysis shows how various dimensions of relational interactions significantly predict increases and decreases in achievement due to racial match.
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