Chapter 14 Case 11: Broken Circles: Building Inclusive Mathematics Communities

As mathematics teacher educators with commitments to equity and justice, we have a vision for mathematics education in which all people are engaged with sensemaking; everyone is valued for their humanity and recognized for their mathematical competence; where students and teachers bring their whole selves to classrooms and their identities and cultures are seen, valued and sustained; and where everyone is exploring rich math ideas together for joy and flourishing. Our vision is currently uncommon in many math classrooms in the United States (Louie, 2017). Instead, mathematics teaching and learning communities are broken, governed by cultural norms that frame mathematics as fixed, position students within a hierarchical structure based on narrow conceptions of competence, and exclude many from rich learning opportunities. Race and gender have played a critical role in determining where people are positioned in these hierarchies of competence and who gets excluded (Louie, 2017; Martin, 2009). This idea is not new—school mathematics has long been described as colonizing and harmful to Black and Brown communities (Martin, 2009; Nicol et al., 2020; Tate, 1995).