Follow-up on Student Identity and the Politics of the Textbook
By: Megan Parise Schmidt
This year at the MCTM Spring Conference, I was humbled to have been part of the closing keynote Ignite event. This semester, as a doctoral student at the U of M, I did a research project on the heteronormative power structures in high school statistics textbook. It was three months of reading, coding, writing, and editing. The challenge before me, however, was to put all of those hours of work into a 5-minute, provocative (and also entertaining) presentation. Luckily, the textbooks I reviewed gave me plenty of visual material.
The difference between an Ignite presentation and a conference session is that the latter, in many cases, is interactive. And that interaction is important because in those conversations, the work and change happens. The ideas in interactive presentations may be easier to bring to mind because you are left with artifacts (handouts, powerpoint slides, conversations) that help trigger your memory. Therefore, I consider this article part of the virtual artifacts I want to provide to accompany my Ignite presentation, and I want to continue this conversation with any teachers who wish to engage in this work.
Sara VanDerWerf, past MCTM president, said these words which have been seared into my brain and have driven much of the work I have pursued: As mathematics educators, we have the unearned privilege to ignore the events of our students’ communities and get away with it. I think this quote can also be applied to mathematics curriculum. Mathematics curricula has the unearned privilege of ignoring many of the identities students bring to our classrooms. And they get away with it.
I realize that there are complexities in producing a textbook aimed at a Common Core market of 42 41 states. But it seems as though mathematics textbooks are operating under the assumption that as long as they have an equivalent number of problems with male-based characters as female-based characters and a wide range of ethnicities in the stock photography, then everyone should feel represented. But it was this facade of inclusion that made me want to take a deeper look at textbooks in the first place. In the rest of this article, I outline some of the issues I have uncovered and potential ways teachers can address them.
Gendered Math Problems
A quote from an article by Indigo Esmonde (2011) solidified my need to make the mathematics textbook the site for my research project. He says, “I have never seen a mathematics problem involving a queer or explicitly gender non-conforming character. By erasing the existence of such people, the textbooks support heteronormative and gender binary thinking” (p. 30). Although this article was written in 2011, textbooks have not made much headway in the last 8 years, and one would still be hard-pressed to find such a problem in a commercially produced textbook.
There are a number of issues with the frequency in which gender is used as context for mathematics problems, but I am going to focus on two. First, as Esmonde points out, the use of boys/girls, males/females, or men/women, particularly to compare them, is predicated on gender as a binary construct. In other words, there are two choices: boy or girl, male or female, man or woman. Gender is simply more complex than that.
Second, and related to the first assertion, is that gendered math problems implicate certain characteristics as being “masculine” or “feminine.” In my Ignite, I referenced the “Shoes” problem that seems to show up in most every statistics textbook out there. The problem usually gives a fabricated set of data or a student-generated data set which involves mentally counting the number of pairs of shoes one owns and placing that number in the correctly gender-labeled category. Students are usually asked to make some sort of graphical display that allows them to compare the two data sets, for instance in back-to-back stem and leaf plots. The implication here is that girls stereotypically own more shoes, so the discussion will most likely center around the differing skewness of the graphical representations.
I probably do not have to convince you that navigating one’s teenage identity is emotional work. This one particular example about shoes may not seem very problematic by itself. But compounded with all of the other gendered contexts in the mathematics curriculum, textbooks reinforce implications for what being a “boy” or a “girl” means.
One option to address these issues may be to just ignore or skip exercises that contain gender comparisons. While this may be a viable option, if you teach a course like statistics, gender comparisons are so pervasive that one can not simply ignore them altogether. Another, more student-empowering solution would be to address the issue with your class. Allow them the opportunity to critique the way gender and sex are represented in their textbooks and allow them the space to share their experiences with gender diversity if they wish. These discussions may not change the way gender is represented in the math textbook, but it provides acknowledgement to gender identities that the textbook attempts to erase.
Defining “Mathematician” as White and Male
Almost every textbook I have ever encountered has included mentions of specific mathematicians. These bite-sized blurbs give a little historical context to certain concepts like the Pythagorean theorem, the Cartesian coordinate plane, and Venn diagrams. Much less often do the books mention that Euclid studied mathematics in Alexandria, Egypt, that Fibonacci learned the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in North Africa, and that Sir Francis Galton founded the eugenics movement. And textbooks are not the only culprits. I cannot tell you how many times I have come across lists dedicated to the celebration of mathematicians through the ages only to be disappointed that these lists include very few (if any) women or people of color.
As math educators, we can challenge ourselves to dig deeper into the history of our discipline and look beyond the Greeks that often are the only ones who show up in our textbooks. Annie Perkins, math educator at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, has done some wonderful work in this area with her Mathematicians Project. Her blog is a great place to start.
Representing People of Color as Athletes
In my Ignite and in my research project, I made a note of the way people were represented in stock photographs versus real photographs. The stock photography contained in high school statistics textbooks are balanced with respect to gender and display a wide range of ethnic diversity. Beyond the pictures of white, male mathematicians, I found that the pictorial representations of real people of color were most often athletes (with the occasional President Obama). Content and images related to sports seem like an attempt by the authors to create relevance for their audience (See, kids! Stats is cool because we can do probability with Lebron James’s free-throw percentage!).
There is a strong connection between sports and statistics that textbooks want to exploit, and I do not want to downplay the importance of mathematical contexts germane to the lives of students. However, when attempts at relevance result in narrow representations of marginalized student populations, “relevance” can mean further marginalization.
Concluding Thoughts
Statistics, although mostly quantitatively defined in the K-12 mathematics standards, does not operate completely objectively. Just like any other area of mathematics, the calculations and measures valued in the field of statistics were created by humans whose political and social ideologies played a role in their acceptance as standard. For example, the normal distribution is tightly linked with standardized achievement outcomes, rendering those who fall on the left side of the distribution as deviant or in need of intervention. The popularity of the normal curve has resulted in equating “normal” with “positive” and relegating everything else to the “abnormal” category.
Even if the concepts taught in introductory statistics courses remains unchanged, there is no shortage of data sets that can be used to explore these ideas (I have listed a few at the end of the article). Statistics education researchers and policy makers claim statistical literacy to be ubiquitous with responsible citizenry. If we hope to help each and every student develop statistical thinking skills, we need to reach way beyond the contexts provided in the textbook. We cannot assume that just because the problems contain the same number of “she’s” as “he’s” that our students feel represented and valued in the field of mathematics. We need to embrace who our students are outside of the mathematics classroom and welcome those identities into the mathematics that we do.
References
Esmonde, I. (2011). Snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails: Genderism and mathematics education . For the Learning of Mathematics, 31, 27–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/41319563
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