Mathematics education is a gatekeeper to academic opportunity that disproportionately affects students from historically marginalized communities. This chapter critiques the dominant research paradigms for understanding mathematics learning and argues for a shift toward interdisciplinary and asset-based approaches. Specific examples, frameworks, and recommendations are offered for researchers and other stakeholders seeking to reimagine the role of research in shaping mathematics education.
"What We Know About Learning: Taking Responsibility for Interdisciplinary Complexity in Educating Youth in Mathematics" is chapter 7 of Handbook of Race, Equity, and Asset-Based Research in Educational Psychology, edited by Francesca A. López, Jessica T. DeCuir-Gunby, DeLeon L. Gray. The full book is available from Routledge Press.
About the Book:
Handbook of Race, Equity, and Asset-Based Research in Educational Psychology offers a profound vision of contemporary educational psychology scholarship, practice, policy, teaching, and research design that is both informed by and empowering of social justice.
Despite the ubiquity of educational psychology’s body of knowledge, the discipline has long neglected the academic success, well-being, and other outcomes of historically and systemically marginalized learners and research partners, and the field remains complicit in imposing normative standards and social stratification across diverse populations. This expansive and rigorous volume charts a new course in educational psychology that supports equity-focused research agendas, refined theoretical syntheses, and meaningful attention to the complexities of race, culture, and class. Each chapter vividly contextualizes critical approaches to theory, methodology, philosophy, pedagogy, and other topics, including the direct integration of decolonial, socioecological, translingual, trauma-informed, and community-engaged praxis.
This book’s substantive and deeply considered contributions constitute a significant scholarly reckoning with the exclusionary hierarchies that pervade the field today and an exciting articulation of its future.