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Towards Equity in Mathematics Education pp 63–86Cite as

Adolescent Girls’ Construction of Moral Discourses and Appropriation of Primary Identity in a Mathematics Classroom

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Part of the book series: Advances in Mathematics Education ((AME))

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the way three American young adolescent girls who come from different class and racial backgrounds construct their social and academic identities in the context of their traditional mathematics classroom. The overall analysis shows an interesting dynamic among each participant’s class and racial background, their social/academic identity and its collective foundation, the types of ideologies they repudiate and subscribe to, the implicit and explicit strategies they adopt in order to support the legitimacy of their own position, and the ways they manifest their position and identity in their use of language referring to their mathematics classroom. Detailed analysis of their use of particular terms, such as “I,” “we,” “they,” and “should/shouldn’t” elucidates that each participant has a unique view of her mathematics classroom, developing a different type of collective identity associated with a particular group of students. Most importantly, this study reveals that the girls actively construct a social and ideological web that helps them articulate their ethical and moral standpoint to support their positions. Throughout the complicated appropriation process of their own identity and ideological standpoint, the three girls made different choices of actions in mathematics learning, which in turn led them to a different math track the following year largely constraining their possibility of access to higher level mathematical knowledge in the subsequent schooling process.

This chapter is a reprint of an article published in ZDM—The International Journal on Mathematics Education (2008) 40(4), 617–631. DOI 10.1007/s11858-008-0119-7.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I interviewed the total of eight girls, four from the advanced and regular class. This paper presents only three girls enrolled in the advanced class. April, my fourth participant in the class, showed results somewhat similar to Amanda’s case. Yet, April did not develop as strong a voice as Amanda.

  2. 2.

    I believe that reporting findings derived from my larger ethnographic research is beyond the scope of this paper. However, I presented a few major findings that are essential to understand the results from my discourse analysis presented in this paper. Those findings are explained in Sect. 3 (pp. 7–8).

  3. 3.

    The six areas of “reality” are: (1) the meaning/value of aspects of the material world; (2) activities; (3) identities and relationships; (4) politics; (5) connections, and (6) semiotics (Gee 1999, p. 12).

  4. 4.

    Based on the nature and common usage of these three words (I, we, and they) as generic first person or third person pronouns often used as a proxy for a larger group, I limited my analysis of these three terms to a smaller number of interview excerpts that meet the three criteria. Therefore, the participants’ use of “we” or “they” that did not meet the criteria were not included in my analysis. For example, the participants, of course, used a lot of “they” as they describe their parents, school teachers, and others. Those “they”s were not the target of my analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Leadership, College of Education, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001, USA

    Jae Hoon Lim

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  1. Jae Hoon Lim
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fac. Education, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, 3800, Victoria, Australia

    Helen Forgasz

  2. Dept. Mathematics, San Jose State University, Washington Square 1, San Jose, 95192, California, USA

    Ferdinand Rivera

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Lim, J.H. (2012). Adolescent Girls’ Construction of Moral Discourses and Appropriation of Primary Identity in a Mathematics Classroom. In: Forgasz, H., Rivera, F. (eds) Towards Equity in Mathematics Education. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27702-3_7

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