2018 -- He Who Feels It, Knows It: Rejecting Gentrification and Trauma for Love and Power in Mathematics for Urban Communities

Abstract

Having read Tate’s article soon after beginning my PhD studies (circa 2000), it was one of my earliest awakenings in the field. It had crystalized a prior visit to a Wisconsin classroom on culturally relevant pedagogy taught by Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings and the admonition she spoke to me after class: “Lou, we don’t need another study on functions” (referencing the cognitively guided instruction dominant mathematics culture at my university). I understood this we. Our people. My people. It was the felt presence of my community and communities of the African and Caribbean diaspora upon whose hopes and dreams this work is pursued. Yet, Tate’s call was the harbinger of a more intrusive element in the mathematics of our people—the mathematics education reform enterprise itself.