Using a mathematics cultural resonance approach for building capacity in the mathematical sciences for African American communities

Abstract

The underrepresentation of African Americans in the mathematical sciences in post-secondary education and in professional settings has been well documented. This state of affairs has persisted despite multiple and varied efforts over the years to address the concern. We assert that defining efforts around closing achievement gaps and/or through making moral arguments, such as has often been the case, is insufficient for compelling the levels of commitment and action needed to address meaningfully issues that contribute to the seeming intractability of Black underrepresentation in the mathematical sciences. The equity and access issues at play are embedded in the histories of oppression and devaluation faced by Black people in this nation. In this chapter, we introduce a mathematics cultural resonance framework (MCRF) to inform mathematics teaching, learning, and knowledge production in ways that affirm and draw upon African American cultural resources. We argue for strategies that link mathematics pedagogy with active mathematics research and with the mathematical sciences knowledge, practices, and dispositions embedded within African, African American, and/or other African Diasporic cultural traditions. We posit that culturally resonant approaches facilitate African Americans developing robust mathematics identities and maintain that these approaches provide ripe opportunities for producing new, groundbreaking mathematics knowledge, thereby benefiting the mathematics community (and society) as a whole. In considering implications for using an MCRF to build the mathematics capacity of African American communities, we describe in relative detail our work in the West Ocala community of Ocala, Florida.