ABSTRACT
Each of the last three chapters has taken on a prominent social identity by thoroughly discussing the relevant literature both within and outside of research on mathematics education. This aims to promote a critical practice in mathematics education that engenders inclusion in both content and its access to it. Recall that in Chapter 2 we also dealt similarly with the social identities of languageminority students and students with disabilities. Here and by way of conclusion, we will put these isolated discussions together and in further action in three ways. First, we will break down the false implications of such isolated discussions of social identity and instead favor the notion of intersectionality, in which mathematics students as learners live in fluid spaces of contesting identities. In other words, the previous chapters and discussions should not force us to view any student as simply “not white” or “working class” or “female”; we should instead see that each individual and all communities act within and through an intersection of multiple social identities constructed by sociopolitical formations of relations between social groups. This discussion falls directly out of our previous discussion of third-wave and Black feminism of the preceding chapter. Second, it is important to situate our work of critically teaching mathematics within the current context. To do so, I provide a brief review of the history and politics of mathematics education, a somewhat hard to swallow tale for critical mathematics teaching. Following this, the third section responds with a review of essential readings for critical mathematics educators. The previous chapters have covered these as they relate to race, class, and gender, but here I put together a sketch of specific anthologies and journals for further reading. This balances out the second section by providing hope in the midst of dark policy times. Put together, the three sections of this chapter aim to properly situate the preceding chapters in a more comprehensive and total framework.
