• Corpus ID: 147954109

On Defense: African American Males Making Sense of Racialized Narratives in Mathematics Education

@inproceedings{Shah2011OnDA,
  title={On Defense: African American Males Making Sense of Racialized Narratives in Mathematics Education},
  author={Niral Shah},
  year={2011}
}

• Niral Shah
• Published 2011
• Education

In this article, we explore the role of racialized narratives (e.g., “Asians are good at math”) in the mathematics learning experiences of African American male students. Drawing on concepts from sociocultural theory and cultural psychology, we conceptualize racialized narratives as dynamic cultural artifacts, which students appropriate and deploy in processes of identification and positioning. Interview data suggest that students had deep knowledge of these narratives, and made sense of them in a way that linked perceptions of Asian Americans as a mathematically gifted “model minority” to perceptions of African American males as intellectually inferior. Despite this positioning, many students spoke of repurposing racialized narratives in order to assume positions of mathematical competence. The learning sciences has long known that learning is deeply related to engagement; learning occurs when one is invested in the learning setting, and when one has access to the resources necessary to learn. Identity, then, is deeply intertwined with processes of learning, because identity speaks to one‘s sense of connection and belonging. In their groundbreaking book, Situated Learning, Lave and Wenger (1991) tell the story of a newcomer to the activity of meat-packing. He is charged with the task of wrapping the meat, and is sequestered in that task in a way that prevents him from learning how to cut the meat. They argue that this leads to him being unable to develop an identity as a meat-cutter, thus relegating him only to wrapping the meat and accepting a marginalized identity. This story illustrates the ways that we have typically thought about identity and learning in the sociocultural literature on learning. We have come to view identities as being rooted in and developed through the everyday learning