A U.S. professor who teaches future public school teachers will “argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” in a keynote to the Mathematics Education and Society conference this coming January, says her talk description.
“The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction,” the talk summary says. “What are appropriate responses to reverse such a relationship?” We can already guess University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Rochelle Gutierrez’s answer, from reviewing her published writings and comments. Her plans for “an insurgency by the people” to subvert public institutions and American self-rule through “ethnomathematics” will knock your eyebrows off your face. Let’s take a look.
Her bio says Gutierrez specializes in teaching future K-12 teachers “forms of creative insubordination” and the importance of infusing math with politics. Because, apparently, American kids are already so good at math they have extra time to spend on indoctrination. Oh, wait.
...The most recent “academic” publication listed on Gutierrez’s CV is paywalled, but the second most recent listed is a December 2017 article in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, a publication of Georgia State University. Yes, taxpayer-funded institutions are fomenting “research” published under titles like “Separate and Unequal: Students with HIV/AIDS and Mathematics Education,” “Beyond White Privilege: Toward White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism in Mathematics Education,” “Absence of Diversity in Collegiate Upper-Level Mathematics Classrooms: Perpetuating the “White Male Math Myth,” and “Striving Toward Transformational Resistance: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Mathematics Classroom.”
...Gutierrez’s December article is, perhaps not surprisingly, more of a blog post that quotes sources such as Medium.com and activist websites. Rather than being scholarship worthy of the name, it is essentially a political game plan for using math classes and teachers to follow the Marxist political playbook in “[d]ismantling White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
In it, she details how “Alt-Right” institutions such as Fox News and Campus Reform publicized and simplified some of her previous “scholarship” that made, she says, “two key points: (a) mathematics operates as whiteness when we do not acknowledge the contributions of all cultures, and (b) mathematics operates as whiteness when it is used as a standard by which we judge others.”....