Taking the Sociopolitical Turn in Postsecondary Mathematics Education Research

Abstract

In this paper, we argue for a need to attend to issues of equity in postsecondary mathematics education. In the United States, the broader mathematics education field has begun a shift toward attending to sociopolitical aspects of research, which focus on the interrelatedness of knowledge, identity, power, and social discourses. We argue that explicit uptake of sociopolitical perspectives has the potential to offer new insights to current research and to advance efforts to address inequities in meaningful and theoretically well-informed ways. Situating our argument within the social and political context of the United States, we draw on existing studies that examine inequities in undergraduate mathematics classrooms. We highlight studies that focus on the impact of social discourses and institutional contexts on the negotiations of power and identity in postsecondary mathematics. We end by proposing future research directions and discuss challenges for equity work in postsecondary mathematics education.Issues of equity are becoming increasingly pressing in the political landscape and national discourse in the United States. In particular, various forms of professional and economic opportunity are intertwined with issues related to race and gender. Evidence of these relationships spans contexts ranging from trends in police brutality and incarceration (Chaney and Robertson 2013; Pettit and Western 2004) to pay Int.

How Does a Mathematician Fit in? A Mixed-Methods Analysis of University Students’ Sense of Belonging in Mathematics

“…Higher education research has often conceptualised sense of belonging as a basic human need connected to many important factors in students' learning and studying, such as wellbeing and academic performance (Hoffman et al 2002;Theobald et al 2020;Cohen 2007, 2011). Given the previously-reported issues of exclusion in university mathematics context (Adiredja and Andrews-Larson 2017;Croft and Grove 2015;Good et al 2012;Nieminen and Pesonen 2020), it is surprising how rarely the concept of sense of belonging has been directly addressed in this field. The present mixed-methods study identified three student profiles from a sample of university mathematics students based on both their responses to the Mathematical Sense of Belonging instrument (Good et al 2012) and their answers concerning reasons for belonging or not belonging to the mathematics community (as analysed using the framework by Rainey et al 2018).…”

“…To give one illustrative example from our university, in the history of the almost 400-year-old institution, it was only recently that the first female academic was appointed as a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. This anecdotal example represents the personal interest for the authors to conduct socio-cultural research, but it also represents larger issues of equity in university mathematics, which has been described as a context that has not been able to consider under-represented groups (Adiredja and Andrews-Larson 2017;Croft and Grove 2015). Indeed, researchers have asked, for example, why women and people of colour opt out of university mathematics (Good et al 2012;Herzig 2004aHerzig , 2004b and why research on university mathematics education has largely neglected disabled students (Nieminen and Pesonen 2020).…”

Cognition, Interdisciplinarity, and Equity

“…One challenge with studying racial minority groups and other underrepresented students' understandings of mathematics lies in the fact that the students are underrepresented (Adiredja and Andrews-Larson 2017). The participants of the different studies included in the current section were recruited by leveraging different programs and professional relationships.…”

Equity during peer conferences: A linguistic comparison by race and gender

“…Educators have worked for decades to reduce inequity, but it still remains prevalent in a wide variety of mathematics settings (Adiredja & Andrews-Larson, 2017;Gutiérrez, 2008;Leyva, 2017;Martin, 2003…”