DEI Math - what is it good for beyond platitudes and slogans?

November 13, 2023 1:34 PM

I am hoping that someone can explain the meaning and rationale for "DEI math". I am particularly interested in the high school level since many years ago I taught math at a private H.S. Slide from the 44th annual meeting of the North American chapter of the international group for the psychology of mathematics education: " When are we going to admit that many best practices in mathematics education create toxic spaces for historically marginalized students and are violent toward them?”

I ask, what is violent and toxic about traditional ways of teaching math at the secondary level?

DEI has been in the news for a number of years. Is there any objective evidence that DEI initiatives have produced sought after results?

Thanks,
(Curmudgeon, but somewhat open minded progressive)

posted by Kevin S to Education (20 answers total)

I feel like we are missing a lot of context here.
posted by Alensin at 1:45 PM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Have you looked at the conference proceedings for that conference? Looks like there are a lot of interesting studies there, with results, in the “Equity” section beginning on page 348. Without any context for the specific slide presentation you’re referring to, I can’t say whether that particular presentation might be elaborated on in the proceedings, but if not you may find other interesting data about equity and math education there.
posted by Stacey at 1:51 PM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

In my experience as a STEM educator, "DEI math" means that the pictures in the textbook aren't all white kids, and the word problems aren't all about characters with typical white American names doing things that are typical of upper middle class white Americans and instead consider solving problems that might be meaningful to students from other cultures. It also means addressing bias among teachers about who is "good at math".

DuckDuckGo found me this resource page that looks pretty useful. This article from that list seemed helpful: What does an anti-racist math class look like?

If you link to your source for the quote above, folks here can maybe help contextualize it.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:52 PM on November 13, 2023 [29 favorites]

Oh, and your second question, here's a Google Scholar search for effectiveness of diversity equity inclusion in US secondary mathematics education. There's a ton there, much of it freely available, but let me know if I can help get access to a specific article.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:54 PM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not an expert, but this (Battey and Leyva, 'A Framework for Understanding Whiteness in Mathematics Education,' Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 2016) seems to be one of the key scholarly texts.

(Here's an Atlantic article about it.)
posted by box at 1:58 PM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I witnessed a white male 6th-grade math teacher in the United States be physically violent toward an immigrant student. Same teacher tried to place me (a girl) into a lower-level 7th grade math course despite me getting an A in his course. He went on to have the school named after him when he died.
posted by heatherlogan at 2:27 PM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

" When are we going to admit that many best practices in mathematics education create toxic spaces for historically marginalized students and are violent toward them?”

This is among the worst possible ways to frame the problem; I would encourage you to try to tamp down a natural irritation at the shoddy rhetorical tricks and the careless use of ill-defined and inflammatory language as you consider the evidence people are offering you here of a real issue.
posted by praemunire at 2:30 PM on November 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

If I may just speak a bit broadly here - I've done a couple of multi-week DEI courses with instructors in higher ed across the disciplines (I have a humanities PhD, but these courses all included ppl in STEM). DEI has become a bit of a boogey man of late, and no doubt some trainings (esp. some corporate ones put together in haste in 2020) are guilting of leaning heavy on platitudes. Also, for DEI to work, there needs to be buy in - both of the multi-week workshops I did were self-selective and in one case, competitive. It really makes a big difference when participants are all keen to learn and not shy away from tough conversations, and who are committed to implement what they learn in concrete terms - if a school just has a one day mandatory training and that's it, no follow-ups of any kind....yeah, that's just window dressing. But if teachers are committed to being life-long learners in best DEI practices, then yeah, that can make a difference. (Put another way, when I've seen DEI work well in educational settings, it's always in the framework of "this is an on-going conversation that has to adapt to our society as it changes, and nobody knows everything and everybody will sometimes make mistakes because the learning never ends")

But anyway, a lot of DEI in terms of education is, contrary to how it gets depicted in right-wing media, a lot of tweaks (like those mentioned by hydropsyche) or adopting new approaches - for example, recognizing that cold-calling on students can lead to embarrassment and so figuring out different methods to get all students to participate. And sometimes it's about building infrastructure to correct historic exclusions - like, maybe a high school STEM club just for girls. Or, if say you were hiring grad students to do some math tutoring after school, you'd want to avoid only hiring white men, especially if most of the math teachers at your school were white men - in fact, if that were the case, you might make a point of only hiring women/POC grad students.
posted by coffeecat at 3:03 PM on November 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Or, if say you were hiring grad students to do some math tutoring after school, you'd want to avoid only hiring white men, especially if most of the math teachers at your school were white men

Using race or gender as a hiring criteria is very explicitly illegal in the USA, where the OP appears to be.
posted by saeculorum at 4:25 PM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Using race or gender as a hiring criteria is very explicitly illegal in the USA, where the OP appears to be.
You won’t be using race or gender as the hiring criteria. You would be using the lack of knowledge, experience and perspective of other groups, and therefore the lack cultural competency to fully recognize and address the needs, and thus to support the potential of people who are not exactly like themselves.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 4:46 PM on November 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

You would be using the lack of knowledge, experience and perspective of other groups [...] to support the potential of people who are not exactly like themselves.

It is also not legal in the USA to hire based on an assumption that specific racial/sexual protected categories are innately unable to meet job requirements.
posted by saeculorum at 5:20 PM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Right, but if you are hiring with an eye toward taking on tutors with the specific knowledge, experience, perspective and cultural competency to support a diverse student body, then you are naturally going to hire people besides *only* white men. The original comment was about “avoiding only hiring white men.” Okay, I’m done.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 5:28 PM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

One of the difficulties of teaching math is that most people, including math teachers, go about their daily life not doing math. After all, when was the last time you factored the difference between two squares to solve a problem around the house. Math people are at home in the abstract space of numbers with no units attached, so the transition from position to velocity to acceleration is left to physics class.

That said, managing the classroom so that everyone is comfortable and everyone is learning is damn hard.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:46 AM on November 14, 2023

Mod note: Several comments and responses removed. If folks have their own questions about the subject, feel free to create your own AskMetafilter question. In the meantime, please keep the focus of this question on what the OP asked, thank you!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:46 AM on November 14, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks all of you for the thoughtful responses. I have some reading and further study to do. It is only with some effort that I resisted the temptation to respond individually. But here are a couple of comments, I hope not in violation of rules or etiquette.

I now realize that "DEI math” is short for “DEI math instruction” or "DEI math education". Math types tend to make literal interpretations; ie, math and DEI math are different. I conjecture that advocates of “math DEI” come more from the world of professional educators and social activists than from the world of mathematics or other STEM.

It seems to me that the popular (eg news articles) discourse on DEI math education does not adequately distinguish between grade school and higher levels. Examples featuring people in different cultures has little applicability beyond grade school.

Little discussion of early childhood education. Another conjecture: many of the issues addressed by DEI math education would be mitigated if all children had the same intellectual starting point.
posted by Kevin S at 7:15 AM on November 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's some specific context here about teaching strategies that I think folks are missing.

This slide is not talking about "traditional" ways of teaching math at the secondary level, which typically entail lecturing followed by solitary solving of homework problems, with progress tested by in-class exams. Such strategies work great for some students and fail utterly for others--if you have teaching experience you have surely seen both sides.

This slide is talking about "best practices." One of the specific "best practices" that it is addressing is the practice of having students solve problems in small groups and talk to each other about their solutions. There is tons of research showing that this teaching strategy works for more students than the traditional lecture. (Indeed, many students who thrive under the lecture and homework regime are talking to friends about homework problems outside class: the method of internalizing the material is the same, only the location is different.)

However, working on math with classmates can be different from working on math with friends. Students whose backgrounds are different from those of their classmates can encounter racist and sexist comments from their peers. This makes math classrooms that are heavy on group work unpleasant for those students--and yes, toxic. Thus, if you're going to implement group work in classrooms that have students with diverse backgrounds, you need to be prepared for these specific failure modes.
posted by yarntheory at 7:20 AM on November 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

Examples featuring people in different cultures has little applicability beyond grade school.

I disagree. I'm not sure if you've ever been a visible minority, but that stuff gets BAD in middle and high school. I am Indian-American; problem sets featuring people with names like mine, instead of Boomer-era Alice and Bob would have made math far less alienating. It seems like such a little thing, and it certainly can be just window dressing. But it makes a huge difference to minority students. (And again, I'm Indian. Hardly underrepresented in math/STEM.)

Also could be a good way to teach non-base-10; my native language uses multiples of 1/2, 12, 16 depending on context. Bonus for practical applications (culturally responsive or not) instead of a bird flying back and forth between two trains or that goddamn leaky bucket.

Actually Indian mathematics is fascinating, including the development of trig and the principles of calculus, but usually gets relegated to a bit of trivia about who invented zero.

if all children had the same intellectual starting point.

I'm not an early childhood educator, but at least in the US, this is a ridiculous statement. It's like wishing every child were a prince/princess with seventeen servants to do their bidding.

For several centuries, people of color were straight out forbidden from learning to read and write in much of the country. School desegregation is within living memory; thanks to redlining and the resulting property tax disparity, public schools in majority-minority districts remain massively underfunded, even 7 decades after Brown. (I know this because I live in one such district; all my privileged parent-friends leave when their kids hit school age or go for private school.) Economically disadvantaged students also less likely to have a home environment conducive to learning, as the pandemic/online school made abundantly clear. This is not something that can be fixed by having One Plucky Teacher in 1st grade.
posted by basalganglia at 1:50 AM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Clarification: "if all children had the same intellectual starting point." The “if” is important. This is a statement of a long term goal but with no suggestion that the goal could be obtained. However we can start working in that direction. Poor wording on my part.

By “early childhood” I was referring to immersive preschool, not to plucky grade school teachers.

BTW even in the USA, math history is generally brought up only as an aside.
posted by Kevin S at 4:34 AM on November 15, 2023

Wow, as someone with university teaching experience I'm used to colleagues complaining that students were insufficiently prepared at previous levels, but I'd never seen that pushed all the way back to preschool!

Kevin, if you were more familiar with current educational research you would realize that there is plenty of data showing that students with equivalent levels of preparation and past success are regularly encouraged or discouraged from pursuing more mathematics based on the biases that teachers hold. Nicole M. Joseph has some very interesting case studies about Black girls who were not recommended for advanced math courses at the middle school level despite excelling in elementary school, for instance.
posted by yarntheory at 10:30 AM on November 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Feelings of belonging are very important throughout all levels of STEM education. If examples are always about people with "white" names, often doing activities that some students have had no access to (skiing is the one that always jumped out at me), and if all the practitioners that are mentioned look different from you, then that is alienating. People who feel like they don't belong in a field are not motivated to study it, and may not recognize their own talent and their potential to be successful. (Let me tell you about my brilliant female Latina students who consistently hold back and resist taking on new opportunities and challenges because of their absolutely mistaken but reflexive belief that they aren't as good at physics as their white male peers.)

There are also plenty of ways of just teaching better, such as student-centered learning, that 1) improve the performance of all students and 2) decrease the spread between the highest scoring and lowest scoring groups.

Making the effort to include examples from various cultures and reference the work of diverse people within the field is more work, but it's not wasted work! If you look at a greater variety of examples and practitioners, you find neat stuff.

Finally, part of DEI instruction is thinking of students and whole people who have lives outside the classroom, and responding to things that might be holding students back, such as having to have a job to support their family, being a parent, caretaking for young or elderly family members, past or ongoing trauma, poverty, mental or physical illness, etc. Often POC and women have more of these burdens than white male peers.

many of the issues addressed by DEI math education would be mitigated if all children had the same intellectual starting point.

Sorry, this is just not true, at least for some values of many. For example, the higher you ascend in STEM, the fewer women and POC you find. You'd think that as STEM education improves, those people would experience less difficulty because they know more. But the numbers of women in physics have flattened out and much less than 50%, and they have even declined in computer science.

If you put a very talented, skilled and knowledgeable person in an alienating environment, they will tend not be as successful as they could be. A student of color with a great pre-K and elementry math background who ends up in a calculus class where the repeated theme is that math is done by white males will tend to be discouraged, and then they are spending their energy and brain cycles on overcoming those negative feelings instead of spending them on learning how to do math.

As STEM educators and practitioners, we often want to think that we can just use logic and rationality to overcome our own biases and the feelings but 1) most people can't, 2) we are not actually as good at this as we think we are (my colleagues who most pride themselves on their own logicalness can be the hardest to convince of the impact of bias because somehow there's always something wrong with every study on bias, so obviously bias doesn't really exist) and 3) the STEM culture we have created tends to weed out people who can't logic their way out of having feelings. I don't think that's a good thing for the field, or for society, because people with feelings still can do—and need to do—math. Being able to ignore or suppress your feelings can insulate you somewhat from the effects of bias (less so when you're denied opportunities because of it.) But I don't know that that makes you a better mathematician. So maybe we need to acknowledge that the problem is not necessarily students' ability or educational background, but rather the unnecessary barriers we have created to their success.
posted by BrashTech at 12:03 PM on November 15, 2023 [5 favorites]