The three of us came together to engage in a research project aimed at understanding how a secondary mathematics curriculum could disrupt patterns of injustice in mathematics education. We have taken up Dr. Joseph’s Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogies (BlackFMP) framework to guide our analysis of CPM’s new Inspiring Connections curriculum, which has an explicit goal of supporting teachers to be culturally responsive to their students as they practice ambitious mathematics instruction.

We are learning a lot from our collective work — we continue to learn about the vision and implications of BlackFMP, curriculum design, each other, and ourselves. We share our experiences doing this curricular research and the important implications for teachers as we reflect on our teaching experiences throughout the research process. We structured this article as a pseudo-interview, with questions that we mutually agreed were important to answer. Our responses to these questions are not off-the-cuff but instead are considered responses. Overall, we hope this article gives you insight into — or at least spurs you to reflect on — how your experiences might influence how you interpret the purpose of different aspects of your curriculum based on the potential impact that it has on students.

1. How did BlackFMP become your framework for analysis? Why BlackFMP?

We chose BlackFMP because it is one of the few frameworks that explicitly addresses how to disrupt injustice in mathematics education. We are familiar with and value other mathematics-specific equity tools including those available through https://equitablemath.org/, an organization promoted by leading math-ed organizations such as Achieve the Core.

What we really appreciated about BlackFMP was the way it builds on mathematics education research and shows how the important, decades-long scholarship on ambitious mathematics instruction is necessary but insufficient for making meaningful changes in mathematics education at scale. We also appreciated the way BlackFMP drew attention to Black girls specifically, calling out the way that Black girls’ marginalization is compounded by the ways they are racialized and gendered in mathematics classrooms, and United States society more broadly. BlackFMP taught us that it is important to attend to the needs of specific groups and the specific ways that they experience oppression in mathematics education if we hope to disrupt that oppression. At the same time, we think that attending to and designing against the ways that Black girls are marginalized in mathematics education will benefit all students. If we design for those who are marginalized first, rather than as an afterthought, everyone wins.

2. What is BlackFMP?

BlackFMP is a framework or a model for mathematics pedagogy that is grounded in the theory of intersectionality. To describe it at a very high level, intersectionality tells us that we must attend to the complex relationship between systems of power and oppression and multiple dimensions of someone’s identities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality) if we want to understand the outcomes of social institutions like mathematics education. Building on this theory, Dr. Joseph builds BlackFMP from the four dimensions of Ambitious Mathematics Instruction, Academic and Social Integration, Robust Mathematics Identity, and Critical Consciousness & Reclamation. Below we provide a series of questions we synthesized based on how we apply these dimensions in our coding.

Lara: I’m a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered woman who grew up with middle-class parents. My parents were divorced so I split my childhood between the city in CA’s bay area and rural life in South Dakota. I’ve also experienced trauma related to a childhood caregiver’s untreated mental illness and addiction/self-medication. This trauma made my early adult years a challenge and made me yearn for a career with meaning. My joint interest in mathematics and well-being led me to pursue mathematics teaching and eventually mathematics education research. It wasn’t until I became a high school math teacher in a community where my whiteness made me the minority that I began to realize my white privilege: my career trajectory of (what I count as) success despite the challenges I faced was not primarily an outcome of my hard work. When I use BlackFMP today to analyze mathematics curriculum, I remember who I was as a young teacher who was just starting to see her own unearned privilege as she taught students who saw her privilege very clearly. I think about all the ways I enacted the status quo with my students, and I draw on BlackFMP to help me see the ways a curriculum might have helped me do it differently.

Mike: I am a white, cis-gendered heterosexual man from the middle-class suburbs of a mid-sized city in Indiana. While my educational experiences were embedded in racially and economically diverse classrooms, I was awarded unearned privilege as I navigated life in a society normed by whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. I began to recognize the pervasiveness of my privilege through my partnerships with students and families as a high school mathematics teacher in New Jersey with a Black and Latinx student population. With my students in mind, I continued to push back against and learn more about practices that maintain white supremacy culture in mathematics classrooms through my doctoral program focused on teaching mathematics for social justice. Utilizing BlackFMP has supported my understanding of what can be centered in the immediate future when we actively work to decenter whiteness in secondary mathematics classrooms and work toward a more equitable and truly reimagined mathematics education.

4.  In what ways have your experiences as a mathematics teacher been reaffirmed or challenged through your interactions with and reflections on BlackFMP?

Marlena: BlackFMP has reaffirmed the ways in which I taught that humanized my students. Through our robust discussions, there have been times when I realized that classroom practices I attributed as cursory were not, rather, these were practices I implemented based on my positionality. BlackFMP has challenged the ways in which I viewed equity work in mathematics. I left corporate America for graduate school, after being burnt out from working in education, and I previously viewed equity work as futile. BlackFMP has reignited the hope that I have for equity in math education.

Lara: My experiences as a mathematics teacher have been given new clarity by BlackFMP – it gives me a new lens that helps me attune to the finer points of how instruction can be oppressive and/or liberatory. For example, BlackFMP tells me that critical consciousness isn’t enough: mathematics instruction needs to support students to reclaim mathematics as by and for them. I think what I have really gained out of my work with Dr. Joseph’s BlackFMP is rooted in my conversations with Marlena and Mike: we affirm each other’s intellectual contributions but also clarify, extend, and push back on each other’s ideas. I think it is essential in this kind of deep learning that we surround ourselves with people who are willing to take risks to challenge us. I wouldn’t have learned as much without them.

Mike: Broadly, reflecting on and analyzing CPM’s curriculum with BlackFMP has reaffirmed much of my mathematics pedagogy at the high school and collegiate levels. Most importantly, though, our conversations about BlackFMP have supported me in further recognizing how I perpetuated whiteness despite my good intentions. For instance, our team has had multiple conversations about growth and fixed mindsets, raising multiple questions, such as, Why is a growth mindset needed? and Who does a growth mindset serve? While I embraced the philosophy of and engaged my students in lessons about growth mindset as a high school teacher, this team and our analysis with BlackFMP has supported me to more critically interpret the hidden messages of growth mindset as an individual endeavor in which students, particularly those who are marginalized by a society normed by whiteness, must think themselves into achieving without attention toward the systemic barriers they face.

5. How has your thinking about equity in mathematics education changed since you began using BlackFMP to analyze a secondary mathematics curriculum?

Marlena: Prior to using BlackFMP to analyze curriculum, I saw equity work as either occurring in a vacuum or occurring at the surface level without truly attending to oppression and intersectionality. This work has allowed my thinking to grow beyond individual teachers and individual schools doing equity work, to consider how we can attend to equity in math education at the curriculum level.

Lara: I think one of the biggest things I have learned in this project has been the importance of “calling a thing a thing.” In a project, meeting, Marlena shared those words of her graduate advisor, Dr. Nicole Joseph. This has become our shared new standard for what counts as robust challenges to the status quo. I have come to realize that not “calling a thing a thing” actively perpetuates problematic narratives. For example, as Mike shared, growth mindset perpetuates the problematic narrative that perseverance is an individual endeavor and mindset is a problem to be fixed within individuals. Calling a thing a thing means naming the systemic practices that encourage students to develop a fixed mindset: standardized tests and college entrance exams, most grading practices, narrow ways of defining acceptable participation, etc. While I believe there is some power in the ideas of growth mindset (e.g., telling students they are gifted or smart can make them averse to taking risks and making mistakes and so not being gifted or smart anymore), the big picture of how the system and we as participants in it (as researchers, curriculum writers, teachers, etc.) encourage fixed mindsets has to be explicit and disrupted. Mindsets are just an example of this larger phenomenon of “calling a thing a thing!”

Mike: Prior to this project, I believed that only radical change to the mathematics education enterprise would result in truly equitable learning experiences. Engaging in conversations about and engaging in analyses with BlackFMP has supported my recognition of what changes are possible for supporting students to have more just experiences in secondary mathematics classrooms in the immediate future. I continue to reflect on the tension between radical, systemic change, and the role of incremental change that serves students in classrooms today, such as that of BlackFMP. Our project gives me hope for both.

6. What’s next?

Scholar Danny Martin has critiqued NCTM and the entire system of mathematics education, saying in essence that we need to tear the whole thing down and re-imagine it. He’s probably right. By focusing on BlackFMP, we take another tack, because, paraphrasing Dr. Joseph, kids are going to be in school on Monday. We want to make change that can support students today and tomorrow, but we also wonder, can BlackFMP be a tool to help us move toward re-imagining the system in Martin’s sense? One thing that we have seen that BlackFMP helps us do is name problems, and see when problems aren’t named. We frequently have conversations about what could have pushed a particular “author’s vision” (a portion of the curriculum that provides teachers with insights into the authors’ intent and strategies like pocket questions and math language routines) to be more robust by “calling a thing a thing.” Kimberlé Crenshaw — law scholar and coiner of the term intersectionality — said in her TEDtalk, “If you can’t name the problem then you can’t see the problem, and if you can’t see the problem then you pretty much can’t solve it.” As we continue to be able to see new things through our application of BlackFMP, we will continue to spread the word about what we learn. We encourage you to do the same by checking out podcasts (check out these two by Dr. Joseph for NCTM and NCSM) and exploring how the BlackFMP questions we shared influence your interpretations of curriculum.