Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Secondary Statistics
2022-06
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Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Secondary Statistics
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2022-06
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Statistics and data analysis have been part of the K-12 mathematics curriculum for the past few decades, and in conjunction with mathematics standards documents, the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education report clarified learning progressions for statistical content in K-12 mathematics (Franklin et al., 2007). Yet many secondary mathematics teachers struggle with teaching statistics because of its dependence on context and its use of variability (Cobb & Moore, 1997). Because of this struggle, secondary mathematics teachers who teach statistics may rely heavily on textbooks and pre-packaged curricula to drive their instruction. However, as I will demonstrate in the first paper of this dissertation, commercially published secondary statistics curricula in the United States often project a narrowed view of the world with respect to the types of contexts they use to develop statistical understanding. The first paper was the impetus for this three-paper series on statistics curricula. In this study, I used queer theory and critical mathematics education to examine the exercises, examples, and other text from three widely circulated statistics textbooks. I then applied critical discourse analysis to develop overarching themes related to the way in which the identities of gender, sex, and sexuality are developed through the sample textbooks. I found that, in addition to defining sex and gender as conflated and binary, the textbooks also construct identities of in ways that maintain strict boundaries between women/females and men/males, and these boundaries uphold heteronormative ideologies. This paper has implications for textbook publishers, teachers, and researchers and has been published in a special issue on Gender in Mathematics in Mathematics Education Research Journal (Parise, 2021).
Based on the findings from this paper, I wanted to explore how statistics students and teachers interacted with these identity constructions. Therefore, in the second paper, I examine how statistics students are implicated in telling a heteronormative narrative through statistics textbook word problems that use gender, sex, and sexuality as context. I draw from Gerofsky’s (1996) research which establishes mathematics word problems as genre with specific story-like components. I then apply Wortham’s (2003) work on discursive parallelism to demonstrate how the statistics student engaging in the problem is complacent in completing a heteronormative narrative to be academically successful. As the problem progresses, and the parallelism between the two students is solidified, the real student doing the problem merges with the fictitious student in the word problem. The real student confirms the stereotype that women only date men who are taller than they are and then removes an “abnormally” tall woman from the data set. This narrative is then reinforced by a statistical calculation, the correlation coefficient. This paper has implications for teachers who aim to counter the overwhelmingly heteronormative ideologies present in mathematics and statistics textbooks.
The third paper builds on the first two by examining how statistics teachers enact curriculum and analyzing teachers’ commitments and actions that disrupt heteronormative and gender/sex binary narratives in their curricular resources. For paper three, I review background literature on teachers’ use of curriculum as well as on how statistics teachers committed to justice-oriented teaching use curricular materials to attend to social issues in their classrooms. As a theoretical lens, I employed Gutstein’s (2006) teaching mathematics for social justice to create a justice-oriented statistics teaching framework. I interviewed Advanced Placement Statistics teachers who align their teaching philosophies toward justice-oriented statistics teaching and asked questions related to how they use or modify their curricular materials to address issues of sex, gender, and sexuality in class. I found that the type of curricular material mediated the teachers’ perceived authority over modifying the resource, particularly when they use Advanced Placement practice items. Lastly, I discuss how secondary statistics teachers can encourage their students to apply a critical lens to Advanced Placement practice items in order to develop critical statistics literacy.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2022. Major: Education, Curriculum and Instruction. Advisors: Erin Baldinger, Terrence Wyberg. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 117 pages.
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Parise, Megan. (2022). Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Secondary Statistics. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/259629.
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