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In this paper, we speak to the ways that Black people have consistently strategized and advocated for rights and the education of their children through communal efforts related to a collective Black identity. We use a framework of Black X Consciousness and ontological Blackness to nuance the ways that Blackness is internalized and taken up by members of this group and assert that although Blackness is a unifying factor, diversity in ideologies and goals exist. The ways that Black people have historically worked through these issues in hopes of achieving better education for their children is especially highlighted, along with the ways that these communal ideals may be utilized as forms of capital for Black children learning mathematics. Given this understanding, we also assert that what is generally culturally relevant for the collective may not be as prominent or relevant among various Black identities. In addressing the question of how to cultivate a mathematics education that is culturally relevant for Black children in particular, we discuss how our predecessors taught us that communal ontologies are instrumental in a) shaping the curriculum of a mathematics education worthy of Black children and b) shaping the facilitation of teaching and learning to which Black children are exposed.

Recent studies reveal people from marginalized groups (e.g., people of color and women) continue to earn physics degrees at alarmingly low rates. This phenomenon is not surprising given reports of the continued perception of physics as a masculine space and the discrimination faced by people of color and women within the field. To realize the vision of an equitable physics education, fully open to and supportive of marginalized groups, teachers need ways of seeing equity as something that is concrete and actionable on an everyday basis. In our work, teachers have found value in intentionally reflecting on their instruction and their students explicitly in terms of race, gender, and other social markers. We find they are then better positioned to build equitable physics classrooms. Without a focus on specific social markers, common obstacles such as color-evasiveness emerge, which obstruct the pursuit of equity in classrooms.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought booming economies, seemingly world-class health care systems, educational infrastructures, and the lives and well-being of nations to a complete standstill. Georgia was one of the few states that released their Shelter-in-Place order early, while reports suggest that Black communities have disproportionally higher rates of deaths and hospitalizations. What mathematics would allow students to critically examine the data shared and other data reported about the COVID-19 pandemic? In this essay, we apply a culturally relevant pedagogical (CRP) lens to examine the mathematics curriculum taught in K-12 schools before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, we consider the shortcomings of the curriculum given the impact of the pandemic on Black communities in Atlanta, Georgia, and the barrage of statistics used to inform their lives. We consider how to look at mathematics curriculum through a CRP lens and what that means in terms of the scope of standards that are being addressed and the flexibility for teachers to have autonomy to go beyond the prescribed curriculum. Two concentration areas are addressed, and they highlight how to use a CRP lens for secondary and elementary mathematics relevant to our local context in ways that envision how mathematics curriculum can support Black children moving forward.

This paper calls for a critical reimagination of science epistemology and praxis by advocating for a move toward Black liberation in and through K-12 science education. This call is driven by our desires as authors to foster a future of K-12 science teaching and learning that centers, embraces, and promotes historical and contemporary Black scientific innovation and creativity through practices that redress structural anti-Black racism and its implications on Black existence and life. Black Liberatory K-12 Science Education (BLKSE) names the existing challenges with cultivating and empowering Black minds in and through science as a result of anti-Black ideologies that ground and govern K-12 science access, teaching and learning. In naming said challenges as the manifestations of anti-Black ideologies, we shed light on the roles of K-12 science teachers and science teacher education regarding the treatment of Black students given oppressive policies and practices that fail to recognize Black brilliance and innovation. By advocating for a push toward BLKSE, we offer guiding concepts we feel are necessary to begin the process of rooting out anti-Blackness; a process that centers a holistic, heterogenous form of Blackness at the crux of science inquiry and understanding. As a result of this perspective, BLKSE embraces the beauty and creativity of Black youth, naming their positions and ideas as forms of scientific knowledge and inquiry, while disrupting existing mainstream paradigms and practices in science education. Implications for ways to work toward BLKSE in K-12 science teaching and teacher education are provided.

There is extensive evidence suggesting that school suspension is correlated with poor academic performance. However, many studies examining the association between school suspension and achievement focus on the effects of out-of-school suspension specifically. While in-school suspension is offered as a less harmful alternative consequence to out-of-school suspension, the effects of in-school suspension on academic achievement are largely unknown. This article examines the association between in-school suspensions and academic failure on standardized achievement tests. The study utilized secondary data from two cohorts of 380,826 ninth-grade students enrolled in Texas public schools to investigate how many in-school suspensions result in failure on a state standardized achievement test. Our results show that a single in-school suspension is predictive of significant risk for academic failure (greater than 25% chance of failure) on a state-wide standardized test controlling for a host of individual and school characteristics. We also find that this relationship between discipline and risk for standardized test failure is more pronounced for students of color. The implications for school psychologists in terms of curtailing the potential negative impact of in-school suspension on student achievement are discussed.

This article argues that the development of rap song lyrics or lyrical concept mapping can be a viable pedagogical alternative to the development of concept maps as a means to reinforce STEM vocabulary. Hip-hop pedagogy is a culturally responsive pedagogy that leverages the funds of knowledge acquired from hip-hop culture. Unfortunately, many students with strong hip-hop cultural identities may lack equally strong mathematics identities. Given the success of hip-hop pedagogies within the science content area, we posit that hip-hop pedagogies are appropriate in other STEM content areas such as mathematics. Concept mapping is an instructional tool that has been empirically validated as an effective means to develop strong conceptualizations of mathematics content. While hip-hop pedagogy is well established in the science content area, it remains underdeveloped within mathematics education. We argue that the lyrical structure of a rap song is fundamentally similar to the structure of a concept map. This article provides a framework to support lyrical concept mapping as a culturally responsive instructional tool that can be used as an alternative to traditional concept mapping. Special attention is placed on the use of hip-hop pedagogy to affirm and empower dually marginalized students.

Background/Context: The popularity surrounding culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is notable primarily within language and literacy content areas but is also making its rounds in other disciplines. Because of its assumed objectivity and status, the mathematics discipline has long been a site of disrupting or perpetuating inequity and thus warrants our focus in thinking about how any pedagogical framework influences the success of Black students. We question whether the ideology undergirding CSP is beneficial to the ways in which we seek to educate Black mathematics learners through a philosophy of mathematics education that prioritizes language, and Black English more specifically. Purpose/Objective: The objective of this theoretical paper is to take a closer look at the shift in education research that has drawn attention away from asset-based frameworks, like culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) or culturally responsive teaching, to focus on CSP. We seek to address how Black children may be positioned by the ideologies proposed in CSP, particularly in the way that culture, and Blackness in itself, is performed. Our goal is to highlight potential oversights in this framework and to discuss whether CSP represents a viable solution for Black students, particularly in regard to their mathematics education. Research Design: We elucidate the genesis of CSP and establish its roots as in tension with a Black ontology by tracing the theoretical origins of two scholars known best for its conceptualization. Findings/Results: Conceptualizers of CSP build on Ben Rampton's work using the concept of "language crossing" and "styling the other," to level critiques at CSP based on their studies of ritual insults in battle rap and use of African American Language in schools with multiethnic youth. Although it is true that people engage in language-crossing processes quite often, we question whether these actions of language crossing support claims about the eradication of cultural ownership, and at what cost Black people lose these aspects of culture. Conclusions/Recommendations: There are valuable lessons learned from Paris's undertaking, but what Ladson-Billings provided in her theory of CRP was a more powerful conceptualization of improving education for Black students across multiple content areas because of the ways in which it forgoes the often conservative stance on language proffered in the theoretical ideologies of CSP. Discourse and language are inherently significant aspects of mathematics teaching and learning, and Black English is one possible entry into culturally relevant mathematics.

This study is a meta-analysis of the effects of out-of-school time (after school, summer camps, enrichment programs, etc.) on the student interest in STEM. This study was guided by the following research questions: (1) How effective is OST as a means to foster student interest in STEM? (2) How does the effectiveness of OST differ by program and study characteristics? A total of 19 independents effect sizes were extracted from 15 studies investigating the effect of out-of-school time (OST) on STEM interest. Included studies were representative of K-12 settings in the United States from 2009-2015. Specifically studies were included if they directly assessed the effects of OST on STEM interest, and provided sufficient data to calculate an effect size. The status of publication was not a constraint on this investigation, thus grey literature was included along with journal articles to provide a more representative sample of studies. The results suggest that out-of-school time has a positive effect on student interest in STEM. Furthermore, the variation in these effects is moderated by program focus, grade level, and the quality of the research design. The effects of out-of-school time on STEM interest are synthesized, and implications for teaching and practice are provided.

A crucial site of bias in classrooms is class discussions. A new free web-based tool developed by university researchers can help teachers actively monitor how their biases are affecting students in real-time.

According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the U.S. educational system has consistently failed Black and Brown children across both reading and mathematics. Educational research has further uncovered the ways that reading and mathematics assessment and curriculum are often biased and culturally and linguistically unresponsive. In this article, we examine traditional reading and mathematics research to determine how Black and Brown children might be better served through historically responsive literacy. We delineate the Historically Responsive Literacy model and its five learning pursuits of identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Finally, we provide three historically responsive lessons across kindergarten, third, and sixth grade reading and mathematics. It is our hope that this work may help teachers refuse ahistorical curricular frameworks in order to better center our students' reading and mathematics education within the pursuits of intellect, skills, identity, criticality, and joy.

This study examines the relationship between mathematics dispositions and the mathematics achievement of Black students. The study aims to elucidate the acute effects of mathematics dispositions, such as identity, self-efficacy, interest, and utility, on the mathematics Grade Point Averages (GPAs) and credits earned by Black students. A canonical correlation analysis was performed on data from a sample of Black students (N = 2,492) who participated in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009/2012. The results indicate that mathematics identity, self-efficacy, and interest are uniquely related to persistence and mathematics performance for Black students. This study contributes to the mathematics education scholarship by providing data-driven recommendations to support Black students' mathematics instruction that maximizes the influence of their unique mathematics dispositions on their long-term learning outcomes.

Although professional organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) continue to push for the role of equity inside of mathematics classrooms, the need for culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) remains just as necessary today as it has for the last two decades. In this study, the authors share ways in which one preservice teacher (PST) aligned her lesson plan with the tenets of CRP, as proposed by Ladson-Billings (2006). Gladys's (a pseudonym) lesson plan stood out as an exemplar across her 29 classmates in a mathematics problem-solving course, where she and her peers engaged in practice teaching that was set in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual middle school classroom in Second Life (Brown, Davis, and Kulm 2011). These PSTs, along with graduate student assistants and instructors, created avatars to engage in mathematics lessons based on these self-designed lesson plans. Notwithstanding, in this article, the authors intentionally hone in on the planning process to share the aspects of the lesson that are most aligned with the tenets of CRP. Their goal here is to express to other teachers ways that they might design lesson plans that are more culturally relevant for their students. This article is based on the notion that if teachers begin to plan for more equitable instruction to take place in their classes, then they will be more likely to implement it (Kulm 2008).

Background and Context: Computing is being integrated into a range of STEM disciplines. Still, computing remains inaccessible to many minoritized groups, especially girls and certain people of color. In this mixed methods study, we investigated racial and gendered patterns of equity and inequity in high school physics classrooms incorporating computational modeling, with an emphasis on group work. Objective: The objectives of this study were: 1) to document equity patterns in student participation and how they vary based on group composition by race and gender; and 2) to understand how discourses of race and gender influence group interactions. Method: We used the EQUIP web app (https://www.equip.ninja) to analyze quantitative patterns in student participation. We then identified video of three group sessions and analyzed how discourses of race and gender mediated classroom interactions. Findings: Data show that racial hierarchies were prominent, with White students dominating group interaction and Black and Latinx students experiencing substantial marginalization. While there was evidence of gender equity in many groups -- particularly those with greater proportions of girls -- we show how computing and physics were still maintained as masculine spaces. Implications: Teachers of computing should intentionally structure learning environments to attenuate the impact of White supremacy and patriarchy. More research is also needed on how power operates in computing education at the level of classroom interaction.

Drawing from the experiences of 14 Black students participating in a structured undergraduate research program at either an historically Black university or a predominantly White institution, the authors conducted a secondary data analysis on interview and journal prompt data using Yosso's community cultural wealth framework to identify sources of capital for, and challenges to, STEM identity formation. This current undertaking is seen as a direct response to what works, in regards to the practices and conduits that directly influence the preparation and recruitment of Black students into STEM majors. This has noteworthy implications for the role that educators and other members of Black students' communities contribute to their acquisition of cultural capital and subsequently how they develop STEM identities.

In the present study we explored how culture affects the learning experiences of students in a mathematics classroom. The first author, an African American male, taught a class composed solely of two Asian and 15 White students. During this two-week statistics course, students were asked to engage in a "per-formative" assessment that was intentionally linked to the teacher's culture. Findings presented in this study are based on feedback from a student survey addressing the question: How did hip-hop communicate or supplement the students' learning of statistics? The results aid in explicating the alignment between culture and mathematics by altering the learning norms and pedagogical strategies that often undergird traditional teaching.

The stories, narratives, and experiences of Black male mathematics students and educators are graining traction in the literature. With that, the field of education is calling for efforts to empower Black male students in mathematics. This article reports on one effort--a symposium specifically designed to mathematically empower Black male students. More precisely, Black men speak in this article by sharing reflections about the symposium, especially in light of the fact that the first author was the organizer and the co-authors consisted of a unique panel of three Black male mathematics educators at the event. Furthermore, our research agendas are shared, which are not meant to be prescriptive, but to highlight how our respective research efforts advance mathematics achievement outcomes for Black students in K-16 contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]