Critical Perspectives of Racialized Identities within Social Justice and Equity in Mathematics Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This special issue started as a conversation among colleagues wanting to create a bigger space for challenging conversations on equity and social justice. We sought the opportunity to guest edit this issue in order to create a platform for work that fosters and encourages new ways of investigating the intersections of social justice, mathematics education, and equity. We already had notions of our colleagues’ bravery in pushing boundaries, but never did we imagine the incredible work being done. The pieces in this special issue conceptualize, in different ways, the racialized identities of students and teachers, and we feel this strong focus has helped us achieve our goal. We recognize, however, the political responsibility of being editors for a special issue bestowed on us. There were many difficult decisions about whose voice to include and whose to exclude, what qualifies as high quality and why are those the criteria we are using, and how do we demonstrate the range of research related to social justice. Many conversations were needed to determine the voices that needed to be elevated through this platform we graciously were provided by the editorial team of Investigations in Mathematics Learning. We are proud of the work in this issue and all those who contributed to it, including the reviewers, authors, all who submitted proposals, and the editors of IML. As both a beginning and an end of this editorial process, we feel a responsibility to articulate the ways we make sense of interrelationships among concepts, processes, and aims relevant to social justice, so we offer the following frame. For us, social justice lives more as an adjective than a noun – it is a phrase delineating a particular way of being/becoming rather than an object denoting a static entity. The attribute of “socially just” represents one of many potential ways of being/becoming and, thus, is far from inevitable. For us, drawing on Bell’s (2016) formulation, being socially just means the context and conditions for the topic under consideration (e.g., a society, a classroom action) are such that each person can become their full selves and can participate wholly in mutually beneficial social processes. Being/becoming socially just, then, implies both a set of initial conditions as well as (in)tangible results or lived experiences. One requisite precondition, of the set of initial conditions for being socially just, is equity, which we see as a state of being in which every person, particularly those who have been historically marginalized, has access to what they require in order to meaningfully engage in these processes of forming socially just contexts. Specifically, in action, for us, being/becoming socially just entails: