(Re)Creating the Script: A Framework of Agency, Accountability, and Resisting Deficit Depictions of Black Students in P-20 Education (2020)Accordingly, this article interrogates that question and examines how historical racial biases
continue to afflict Black students. Also, the authors examine research concerning Black student
agency as a counter to marginalizing depictions. Furthermore, conceptual guidance (i.e., The
Aftermath Framework) is offered to identify, challenge, and disrupt the continuation of majoritarian
narratives concerning Black students, which often restrict opportunity structures and Black students’
overarching educational trajectories.
Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math (2020)We collected data on exam scores and failure rates in a wide array of STEM courses that had been taught by the same instructor via both traditional lecturing and active learning, and analyzed how the change in teaching approach impacted underrepresented minority and low-income students. On average, active learning reduced achievement gaps in exam scores and passing rates. Active learning benefits all students but offers disproportionate benefits for individuals from underrepresented groups. Widespread implementation of high-quality active learning can help reduce or eliminate achievement gaps in STEM courses and promote equity in higher education.
Black Mathematics Educators: Researching Toward Racial Emancipation of Black Students (2018)This article focuses on the scholarship of Black mathematics education researchers whose work focuses on Black students in P–20 mathematics spaces. We conducted a metasynthesis literature review of empirical studies by Black mathematics education researchers. The authors utilized critical theories of race and racism to aid in the synthesis of the literature. The Black researchers we reviewed challenged the perspective that failure and limited persistence in Black students who are learning and participating in mathematics is normative. As a critical defense, these scholars offer research that problematizes test score data, race and racism, opportunities to learn mathematics, identity considerations, and other constructs that produce unequal effects in mathematics learning. We found that Black mathematics education researchers strategically disrupt the deficit narrative about Black students. Black scholars select theoretical frameworks that allow them to focus on race and how racism operates in mathematics education. We present this research to incite dialogue among all mathematics educators about improving the mathematical context for Black students.
A Brief Social-Belonging intervention in College Improves Adult Outcomes for Black Americans (2020)Could mitigating persistent worries about belonging in the transition to college improve adult life for black Americans? To examine this question, we conducted a long-term follow-up of a randomized social-belonging intervention delivered in the first year of college. This 1-hour exercise represented social and academic adversity early in college
as common and temporary. As previously reported in Science, the exercise improved black students’ grades and well-being in college. The present study assessed the adult outcomes of these same participants. Examining adult life at an average age of 27, black adults who had received the treatment (versus control) exercise 7 to 11 years
earlier reported significantly greater career satisfaction and success, psychological well-being, and community involvement and leadership. Gains were statistically mediated by greater college mentorship. The results suggest that addressing persistent social-psychological concerns via psychological intervention can shape the life course, partly by changing people’s social realities.
Conceptualizing a Mathematics Curriculum: Indigenous Knowledge has Always Been Mathematics Education (2019)This paper results from programming of Indigenous Logix: MathematicsjCulturejEnvironment
(IndigiLogix). IndigiLogix’s intention is to increase Indigenous students’ love for mathematics as
well as college access and success. Through IndigiLogix, it was transparent that the mathematics
knowledge imparted to our Indigenous students derived from a western K-12 educational view.
Thus, we found the need to conceptualize curriculum that centers on the fact that Indigenous
Knowledge has Always Been Mathematics Education (IK-HABME). Through IK-HABME, we
honor our relations with Elders, Community Partners, Indigenous youth, the natural world and
real-life experiences, all while avoiding colonial constructs and measures of success.
Confronting Color-Blind STEM Talent Development: Toward a Contextual Model for Black Student STEM Identity (2018)The findings revealed a void in the research that emphasizes Black students’ academic strengths and positive role of cultural values as approaches to learning. Two models, Whiting’s Black Male Scholar Identity and Ford’s Female Achievement Model for Excellence (F2AME), are highlighted as particularly promising models to inform Black students’ STEM identity. The author introduces key factors of Black student STEM identity as a framework and calls for action to redress the racial and gender inequalities in current STEM talent development that contribute to underrepresentation throughout STEM pipeline.
Developing an Intensive Math Preparation Program to Enhance the Success of Underrepresented Students in Engineering (2015)“This paper explores the similarities and differences in the program outcomes for
minority and non-minority students. Comparisons will be based on student retention and success rates in subsequent math courses, pre- and post-program math self-efficacy survey, and surveys that assess satisfaction with the program and student perception and knowledge of resources and skills needed for academic success.”
Equity, inclusion, and antiblackness in mathematics education (2019)Despite decades of equity- and inclusion-oriented discourse and
reform in mathematics education, Black learners in the U.S. continue
to experience dehumanizing and violent forms of mathematics education. I suggest that equity for Black learners in mathematics education
is a delusion rooted in the fictions of white imaginaries, contingent on
appeasing white logics and sensitivities, and characterized at best by
incremental changes that do little to threaten the maintenance of
racial hierarchies inside or outside of mathematics education.
Moreover, the forms of inclusion offered up in equity-oriented discourses and reforms represent contexts of containment and enclosure
that keep Black people in their same relative position. Refusal is
suggested as a strategy for Black learners to resist the anti-Black
character of mathematics education, and as a first step in actualizing
forms of mathematics education that are worthy of Black learners.
Exclusion and Extraction: Situating Spirit Murdering in Community Colleges (2021)Black, Indigenous, and other students of color (BIPOC) are selecting to
attend community colleges more than any other post-secondary school
setting. However as the author argues, community colleges have, since
their inception, served as exclusionary spaces for labor extraction that
murders the spirits of BIPOC students. This article explores spirit
murdering at a mid-sized urban community college in Chicago. The
author presents historical and contemporary narratives of community
colleges as sites of extraction and exclusion. The article ends with a
call for community college policymakers and practitioners to engage in
a more liberatory hidden curriculum, creating and maintaining more
co-conspiring relationships and a more community-driven ecosystem
of teaching and learning.
INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES: Implementing Indigenous Practices and Perceptions to the Area of STEM (2020)STEM, as framed in the U.S. educational system, is situated in a White
male-dominated field. Thus, this intervention strategy is a response to
Indigenous needs in relation to a colonial White male perspective. In this
section, we purposely weave together how IndigiLogix evolved and how
existing research and personal experiences from our collective informed
the epistemological orientation to this work. The collective attempted to
address two primary questions: (1) How do we disrupt the colonial White
male perspective evident in STEM? and (2) How have Indigenous people
always practiced STEM?
Inquiry as an entry point to equity in the classroom (2017)Although many policy documents include equity as part of mathematics education standards and principles, researchers continue to
explore means by which equity might be supported in classrooms
and at the institutional level. Teaching practices that include opportunities for students to engage in active learning have been proposed
to address equity. In this paper, through aligning some characteristics of inquiry put forth by Cook, Murphy and Fukawa-Connelly with
Gutiérrez’s dimensions of equity, we theoretically explore the ways in
which active learning teaching practices that focus on inquiry could
support equity in the classroom.
Inside the Math Trap: Chronic Math Tracking From High School to Community College (2020)Examining linked academic transcripts from urban community colleges and
their feeder high schools, we identify math course-taking patterns that
span sectors. We highlight stifled mobility and chronic repetition of math
coursework in the transition to college, and we identify “math traps” from
which students do not escape. Math mobility was limited, math repetition
was rampant, and nearly half of students found themselves in math traps. All
else equal, being trapped in math was significantly linked to race/ethnicity,
suggesting that these forms of chronic math tracking across sectors expose
previously undocumented forms of inequality in educational experiences.
Math Self-Efficacy and STEM Intentions: A Person-Centered ApproachThe current study employed a person-centered approach to examine the impact of math self-efficacy and various distal predictors, such as individuals’ demographic information, beliefs about math, and social group identification, on STEM interest and intentions. Specifically, we conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA), thereby inferring three homogeneous subgroups of individuals or latent classes from their response patterns on the 18-item sources of math self-efficacy measure. Our analyses showed that individuals’ ethnicity, implicit theories of math ability, and other group orientation were predictive of class membership (Mastery, Moderate, and Unconfident). We also found that there were significant differences in interest in STEM subjects, interest in STEM activities, individuals’ majors, and retention grade point average across the three latent classes. Our findings support the importance of math self-efficacy in choice of major as well as overall academic performance regardless of whether a student is in a STEM field or a non-STEM field.
Planning as Strategy for Improving Black and Latinx Student Equity: Lessons from Nine California Community Colleges (2018)After examining 178 equity activities, we found only 28 promising activities that explicitly targeted Black and Latinx students with culturally relevant, data-driven, evidence-based strategies. These findings have compelling implications for policymakers seeking to develop reform efforts and institutions using policy to address current and historic inequities faced by Black and Latinx students. The use of planning for improvement is commonplace in educational policy, but we find that more training and capacity-building efforts are necessary to use planning as an opportunity to address racial inequity in community college.
Restoring Mathematics Identities of Black Learners: A Curricular Approach (2019)This article describes an identity-based curriculum, Mathematics for Justice, Identity, and metaCognition (or MaJIC), that provides a form
of mathematics therapy through a restorative
justice framework. The Silhouette Activity is highlighted as one approach that allows Black mathematics learners to engage in a restorative process of writing and drawing the internal and external messages they receive as mathematics doers and knowers.
