DISSERTATION DEFENSE ANNOUNCEMENT Ph.D. in Education Program: Brittany L. Marshall “It’s Not Magic!: Instructional Practices that cultivate positive mathematics identity in middle school Black girls”

A racially and gendered organizational space (Hottinger, 2016, Martin, 2007), mathematics education in the United States places African American girls as “outsiders” to mathematics learning and knowledge production (Gholson & Martin, 2014). We need to comprehend the mathematics and pedagogical communications Black girls are receiving and how these messages affect their development in order to construct supportive classroom environments for these and students. A technique to evaluate and explain how mathematics education serves as an exclusionary gatekeeper to STEM disciplines is traditional mathematical logics (Battey & Marshall, 2024). This three-paper dissertation first looks at how mathematics has been used as a tool to further Western imperialism and perpetuated antiBlackness in schools, then uses Joseph’s Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogies (2021) theoretical framework to directly challenge these traditional mathematics logics and shed light on the teaching strategies and relational interactions (Battey, 2013) that create safe spaces for Black girls to cultivate strong positive mathematics identities.

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