Social (justice) mathematics: racializing effects of ordering pedagogies and their inherited regimes of truth

Abstract

This article examines how making mathematics responsive to perceived differences in students’ real-life needs historically produced racializing distinctions in school mathematics. Decentering social actors and their intentions, we analyze pedagogical techniques in social mathematics courses (1930s–1940s) and social justice mathematics education studies oriented to health and civic participation (1990s–). Despite shifts in ethico-political principles—from enlightening to empowering—racializing effects of these pedagogies persist by projecting relative distances between populations and cultural norms of proper living and well-ordered public life. Juxtaposing past and present, we highlight dangers in how pedagogical interventions to improve malleable differences in children and communities also racialize target groups as yet-to-develop the evidence-based reasoning or mathematical consciousness deemed necessary to attain what are imputed as healthy private and public life. We offer ordering pedagogies as an analytical tool to interrogate practices of racialization and to account for inherited regimes of truth operating in mathematics education by scrutinizing how pedagogical practices produce difference—dividing and ordering students along a hierarchy of perceived needs.