“Nobody’s Rich and Nobody’s Poor … It Sounds Good, but It’s Actually Not”: Affluent Students Learning Mathematics and Social Justice

Abstract

This article investigates how affluent students made sense of social justice issues that were embedded in mathematics learning activities. I present 2 case studies of such activities at the intermediate and secondary levels in 2 different schools. The analysis draws on video records and classroom artifacts and applies the theoretical framework of figured worlds to consider how students drew on their past experiences and on the structure of the classroom activities to understand the mathematics and the social justice issues. The analysis demonstrates how the 1st activity provided a familiar figured world to support learning about issues of wealth distribution. In the 2nd activity, because of a lack of what are termed intermediary figured worlds, students were left to draw on only their own experiences and background knowledge, including stereotypes about poor neighborhoods.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The material presented in this article was adapted from a paper presented at the 2011 annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in Berkeley, California. The research was supported in part through funding from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. I would like to thank Jennifer Langer-Osuna, Joseph Flessa, Jessica Thompson, Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Paula Hooper, and my research team (Jennifer Calix, Lesley Dookie, James Eslinger, Stephanie McKean, and Miwa Takeuchi) for helpful feedback during the writing of this article. I would also like to thank the teachers and students who participated in the action research project for their generosity in inviting me into their classrooms and for further developing my understanding of teaching mathematics for social justice.

Notes

¹James Gee (1996) made a similar point when he contrasted discourses that are acquired in the home through interaction and those that are learned in more formal educational settings. According to Gee, acquisition does not require explicit instruction, whereas learning does.

²Pseudonyms are used throughout, except in cases when it was not clear who the speaker was.

³Transcription conventions are adapted from those used in conversation analysis. In particular, [ ] is used to indicate overlapping talk.

⁴It is possible to argue that there were actually two community figured worlds involved in this activity: the affluent neighborhood and the high-poverty neighborhood. Because the teacher and students did not openly and meaningfully distinguish between the kinds of characters and storylines found in each type of neighborhood, I follow their reasoning and consider neighborhood life to be a single figured world.

⁵In fact, many high-poverty communities would prefer less, not more, police presence, as they feel that police violence is mainly directed toward community members.