A math conference in Nashville, Tennessee, featured a discussion emphasizing “Equity and Justice.” Several of the educational papers in discussion included “Leveraging Equity and Civic Empathy through Community-Based Mathematical Modeling,” “Discourses of Justice,” “Equitable Teaching Practices: Developing Emergent Bilinguals’ Positive Mathematical Identities,” and “Whiteness in Fearmongering Towards Mathematics Education Reform.” Some scholars claimed current math practices “create toxic spaces for historically marginalized students and are violent toward them.”
From Campus Reform:
One of the speakers delivered a presentation on her paper titled “Learning Trajectories Research Needs a Hard Re-Set” in which she argues that the “reset” can “only be achieved if our community adopts a critical stance that centers equity.” Campus Reform obtained an audio file of the speaker’s presentation. After introducing her paper, the speaker, identified by Campus Reform as Dr. Marrielle Myers of Kennesaw State University, stated that “...anytime I speak I am always engaging as a black girl. I'm engaging as a black girl who was talkative and social and energetic and as so was labeled disruptive and bossy and denied access to gifted programs in elementary school.” Myers also discussed “ableism” in her presentation by posing a question to attendees, asking “How can I create tasks that are not ableist? So when you look at a lot of the supersizing work, a lot of it is that oh, because everybody has two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, and those are the types of things that are kind of built in.”
