Race, Retrenchment, and the Reform of School Mathematics

Abstract

The prospect of a new beginning for mathematics education rests with the ability of mathematics teachers to provide pedagogy that builds and expands on the thinking and experiences of African American students and that focuses on preparing these students to function within our democracy, Mr. Tate suggests. MY PURPOSE in this article is to discuss the importance of connecting the pedagogy of mathematics to the lives and experiences of African American students thereby enabling diem to take part fully in our democracy. Traditionally, schools have provided African American students with few opportunities to connect mathematics to their lives and experiences. More than 60 years ago, Carter Woodson described this dilemma: And even in the certitude of science or mathematics it has been unfortunate that the approach to the Negro has been borrowed from a method. For example, the teaching of arithmetic in the fifth grade in a backward county in Mississippi should mean one thing in the Negro school and a decidedly different thing in the white school. The Negro children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attend a graded school consolidated by free transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.[1] One important implication of Woodson's argument is that mathematics instruction that is built on a student's life experience provides two mathematics learning environments -- within the school and outside the school. Unfortunately, the disciplines that undergird mathematics education - mathematics and psychology -- place great stress on objectivity and neutrality. As a result, school mathematics has been tacitly accepted as a color-blind discipline. Thus very little consideration is given to the cultural appropriateness of mathematics pedagogy. In recent years mathematics textbooks have included pictures of African Americans, and some mathematics textbooks provide information about Africans and African Americans who have contributed to the development of the discipline of mathematics. These efforts represent progress and should be encouraged. Yet I doubt seriously if these efforts will prove sufficient to enfranchise African American students in mathematics. I contend that connecting the pedagogy of mathematics to the lived realities of African American students is essential to creating equitable conditions in mathematics education. THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS What type of pedagogy must African American students negotiate to be successful in school mathematics? Conventional mathematics pedagogy emphasizes whole-class instruction, with teachers modeling a of solving a problem and students listening to the explanation. This is typically followed by having the students work alone on a set of problems from a textbook or worksheet.[2] The goal of this teacher-directed model of instruction is for students to produce correct responses to a narrowly prescribed problem. This type of mathematics pedagogy is consistent with several studies of mathematics instruction conducted in the 1970s.[3] Unfortunately, this conventional mathematics pedagogy is exactly the kind of foreign method of teaching described by Woodson. …