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We contextualize a suggested approach of strengthening equity and social justice research in mathematics education by inserting the mathematics education enterprise into two world events of 2020: the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our intent in doing so is to underscore how white colonialism is forever present everywhere in structures and institutions around the globe, including those of the mathematics education enterprise. The logics of both white supremacy and settler colonialism are described next and then combined into a compounding scheme of colonizing white supremacist logics. To illustrate that colonizing white supremacist logics are not a manifestation of only the West, a discussion of the conflicts and contradictions of white supremacy and Brahminical supremacy in the mathematics education enterprise of postcolonial India is offered. Brief summaries of the five chapters in the “Equity and Social Justice” section of this Handbook are then provided; we highlight how the chapter authors interrogated colonializing white supremacist logics within their respective chapters and point toward additional opportunities. In concluding the chapter, we feature recent USA-based mathematics education research to illustrate some different possibilities when equity and social justice research is indeed strengthened through critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Mathematics has, not only a long history in India like in any other ancient civilization, but it also carries a very high value in the present-day India, basically because of its importance in engineering education. India has made some important contributions to mathematics in the last 150 years. Yet, such a description hides the fact that ‘India’ here refers to a tiny minority of Hindu dominant caste middle-class men (and a couple of women from the same socio-cultural and economic background). Though precolonial India had indigenous traditions of education, the caste and gender to which one belonged determined what kind of education one could get. It is only during the colonial rule that access to education was made independent of one’s caste and it is only as late as 2009 that India made the right to education a fundamental right, making free and compulsory education available for all up to the age of fourteen

In this essay, we contextualize a call for strengthening equity and social justice research in mathematics education by inserting the mathematics education enterprise into two world events of 2020: the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. We do so to underscore how white colonialism is forever present everywhere in structures and institutions around the globe, including those of the mathematics education enterprise. We briefly describe the logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism and then combined them into a compounding scheme of colonizing white supremacist logics. Next, we feature recent USA-based mathematics education research to illustrate some different possibilities when equity and social justice research is indeed strengthened through critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism. We conclude the essay with a justification for getting in good trouble, necessary trouble.

Textbooks function as an important resource for teaching and learning of mathematics at the school level across the world. At least at the primary grades the contents of textbooks are situated in the larger society around the learners, in order that the learners can relate to what is taught to them. This opens the possibility for textbooks to uncritically reinforce the prevailing stereotypes or use the opportunity textbook provide to creatively break the stereotypes. Mathematics education research has engaged with the question of gender stereotypes in mathematics textbooks which has had an impact how gender figures in textbooks. However, gender is neither a binary nor monolithic. In the Indian context, gender is not the only social hierarchy that operates. The National Curriculum Framework 2005(hence forth referred to as NCF 2005) addresses the question of prevailing stereotypes about children from social margins and says care must be taken to ensure that the curriculum, textbooks and classroom interaction do not reinforce the stereotypes. Moreover, in the last two decades transgender people have been able to demand recognition and acceptance at least in the higher educational spaces as transgender people. Given these, it would be important to understand how textbooks reflect the changes and demands. This paper analyses the content of the mathematics textbooks developed by the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) of one Indian state, namely Kerala, to understand how they represent gender, caste, class and religious differences and to investigate if the textbooks are inclusive of the disabled learners. Based on the content analysis of the textbooks the paper argues that even as the textbooks try to ensure representation of both girls and boys in the pictures and word problems and make an attempt to be inclusive of different religions and marginalised cultures (for example by incorporating the picture of Theyyam, which uses an art form of the marginalised people in Kerala) in a textbook, they end up strengthening the existing gender, class, religious stereotypes. It also draws attention to the complete absence of disabled children in the textbooks.

Mathematics education in India is offered in one of the 22 officially recognized state languages or in English even though there are at least 270 languages with more than 10,000 speakers each. Caste, a deep-rooted structure that stratifies Indian society, is integrally linked to shaping state languages. There is minimal research from India that looks at language and mathematics education and practically none that factors in caste. Focusing on Tamil Nadu, a state with a history of anti-caste movement on the one hand and pure Tamil movement (a movement that sought to create a Tamil language with no words from other languages) on the other, this conceptual paper seeks to explore this dimension. More specifically, by using caste as an analytical framework, and by drawing on examples from the mathematics textbooks published by the Tamil Nadu State Board of Education and the experience of a few teachers and learners, the paper seeks to make a theoretical argument that the use of pure Tamil in mathematics textbooks has negative implication for socio-culturally and economically marginalized students who are solely dependent on textbooks as the only source for learning mathematics. There is a strong need for carrying out empirical work that would highlight the nuances and complexities involved in realizing ‘mother tongue’ education in mathematics, particularly for those who belong to marginalized caste-class backgrounds, and we hope that such work would emerge in the future.