A Socio-spatial Framework for Urban Mathematics Education: Considering Equity, Social Justice, and the Spatial Turn

Abstract

In recent years, equity- and social justice-oriented discourses in mathematics education have been working to move the field toward an understanding of mathematics education as inherently and simultaneously social and political. Critical to this movement is the development of concepts that support scholarship, policy, and practice that are oriented toward equity and social justice. In this chapter, we propose a framework that engages scholarship in mathematics education, urban education, critical geography, and urban sociology. The resulting socio-spatial framework for urban mathematics education features a visual schematic that locates mathematics teaching and learning---vis-{à}-vis a mathematics-instructional triad---within a system of socio-spatial considerations relevant to US urban contexts. We situate the math-instructional triad amid a three-dimensional frame. Representing the first axis, we describe established categories of social significations or urban education: urban-as-sophistication, urban-as-pathology, and urban-as-authenticity. The concepts that represent the second (spatial) axis are drawn from considerations of how space is continually constructed: empirical space, interactive-connective space, image space, and place space. The third axis concerns the various moments and perspectives that have evolved and continue to unfold in mathematics education practice, scholarship, and policy. Particularly, we draw on recent depictions of the field's ``moments'': the process-product, interpretivist-constructivist, social turn, and sociopolitical turn. Finally, we use the urban system initiatives sponsored by the National Science Foundation in the 1990s to illustrate the elements of the framework and to demonstrate how the framework can help the field to clarify the relationship between the arrangements of spatial geography and distribution of social opportunity.