Education Faculty Scholarship Copyright (c) 2013 Occidental College All rights reserved. http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty Recent documents in Education Faculty Scholarship en-us Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:59:04 PST 3600 Participatory Action Research (PAR) and the Mathematics Orientations of American Indian Youth - A PowerPoint Show http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/4 http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/4 Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:18:54 PST This is a PowerPoint slideshow drawn from a keynote session at the South Dakota Department of Education's 6th Annual Indian Education & Dropout Prevention Summit, held in Rapid City, SD in September of 2009. The keynote session is dedicated to detailing the potential that participatory action research (PAR) holds for developing productive orientations to the study and use of mathematical knowledge among American Indian students of mathematics. Speaker shares data, analysis and findings from an exploratory study with high school-aged Black males in South Los Angeles indicating that research-centered mathematical inquiry into community-based issues conducted in non-school environments has had positive impact on mathematics orientation, racial identity and social agency. Pedagogical implications for American Indian youth are discussed.

]]> La Mont Terry An Exploration of the Impact of Critical Math Literacies and Alternative Schooling Spaces on the Identity Development of High School-Aged Black Males in South Los Angeles http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/3 http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/3 Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:26:21 PST Urban schools, for many African American students, have effectively become a space for the perpetuation of modern slavery. Large numbers of students, particularly Black males, are being funneled without choice into low-wage labor sectors, military service, underground economies and, eventually, prisons or worse. Key work by math education researchers like Martin (2000; 2006) has shown that ‘race’ and ‘racialization’ are salient aspects of African American students’ experiences in urban schools and broader society that contribute to marginalization in math classrooms and, by extension, myriad avenues of social and economic participation. By purposely grounding race and identity at the forefront of the discourse on African American math achievement, the author attempts to go beyond pipeline arguments to explore the development of racial and mathematics identities, as well as social agency, in alternative spaces to the mathematics classroom – and the subsequent impact that these factors may have on the teaching and learning of mathematics in this study.

This dissertation study centers on the experiences of seven high school-aged Black males with whom the author conducted participatory action research (PAR) in an alternative mathematics classroom in South Los Angeles. The study has several foci: (i) To explore identity by critically engaging high school-aged Black males in research on topics relevant to local urban communities; (ii) to engage Black males in the use of mathematics as a tool for conducting critical research, towards the end of reorienting students to the nature and utility of mathematics; (iii) to determine the degree to which the employment of a critical pedagogical stance can foster the development of (critical) mathematical literacy for these youth; and, (iv) to develop a fuller understanding of how the structures of urban schools and space shape the experience of Black males both inside and outside the math classroom.

Utilizing a critical ethnographic methodology to privilege student voice, the study highlights the alternative math classroom as a co-constructed “counter-space” (Solórzano, Ceja & Yosso, 2000) wherein mathematical counterstory-telling is developed as a normative and sophisticated tool for challenging dominant narratives, structures and other forces which negatively shape the schooling experiences of Black males.

]]> Clarence L. Terry Prisons, Pipelines, and the President: Developing Critical Math Literacy through Participatory Action Research http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/2 http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/2 Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:41:08 PDT Academic success, and the economic well-being it usually affords, is closely tied to math achievement. Key national indicators reveal decades of underperformance of African American males in mathematics. Scholars argue that the schooling experiences of Black males are highly-racialized, are often bereft of significance, and result in academic and social marginalization. The author reports findings from an eight-month participatory action research (PAR) project involving seven high-school aged Black males in South Los Angeles; students undertook research to empirically verify and qualitatively explore narratives concerning incarceration and university enrollment. Utilizing a critical ethnographic methodology to privilege student voice, the author shares how ‘low-performing’ students in an urban setting utilize their mathematical knowledge to become critically literate about these narratives. Highlighting two student-constructed counternarratives he terms mathematical counterstories, the author shows how students used data analysis to contradict dominant understandings about young Black males. The author argues math counterstories are a unique synthesis of critical and mathematical literacies that are supported through PAR. Implications for the re-orientation of high school-aged Black males towards mathematics are discussed.

]]> Clarence L. Terry Expectations of the System http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/1 http://scholar.oxy.edu/edu_faculty/1 Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:20:25 PDT Expectations of the System is a student-created film which details the findings of a participatory action research (PAR) project conducted in South Los Angeles. In the summer of 2008, a critical research team composed of seven high school-aged Black males and a mathematics education researcher (also a Black male) conducted qualitative and quantitative research to explore the incarceration and university attendance rates of 18-34 year old African American males in California state. In the first part of the film, the researchers interview African American men from their community in an attempt to understand underrepresented perspectives on issues pertaining to the prison and schooling systems. The film highlights important themes that emerged from those interviews. In the second part of the film, the researchers turn to findings from trend analysis conducted on state university and state prison data in California between 2000 and 2007. The critical research team found, for example, that contrary to popular assumption, 18-24 year old Black males attended state universities at greater rates than they were incarcerated in state prisons in 2000. The team uses 'surprising' data like these as a basis for shaping "mathematical counterstories" (CRT narratives) that can be understood to both critically challenge and affirm presuppositions about the relative position of the Black male in California state prisons and universities, as well as about these state institutions as systems.

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