The liberatory stances of Black women mathematics teachers

Black women teachers have a legacy rooted in resisting and disrupting racism and racialization in schools. Yet, stories of Black women teachers enacting their liberatory pedagogy in mathematics go untold. This study centers Black women mathematics teachers’ liberatory stances towards teaching mathematics to Black, Latinx, and Southeast Asian students. I use a Black feminist lens to conduct a critical narrative study of five Black women elementary teachers that explores how their racialized mathematics experiences informed their liberatory stances of personal accountability, caring, and being a role model for students in their mathematics classrooms. These liberatory stances resisted normalizing whiteness and anti-Blackness in mathematics classrooms within teachers’ schools. Implications include learning about Black women mathematics teachers’ liberatory stances in different racialized social systems as a starting place to transform mathematics education for liberation.