Let it resound, without bound: The joy and brilliance of Black Language in Mathematics Discourse

Nickolaus Ortiz

This project will devote major energies to planning and producing a documentary focused on the way some Black people (high-school aged youth and beyond) explain their mathematical thinking, processing, and solution strategies, giving an explicit focus to a sociolinguistic analysis guided by Baker-Bell?s description of the features of Black Language (2021). Findings will highlight relevant examples of the syntax, semantics, phonology, and rhetorical features evidenced in participant responses. Analyses will examine participants? explanations for evidence of procedural or conceptual knowledge of the topics. Ultimately, it is not my intention to show that BL is a mutually unintelligible language, but to show that there is a style, a cadence, a joy and a resistance that is embodied in the familiarity of our linguistic practices, all of which have room in the mathematics space. I intend to show that some of these signifying, proverbial uses, and narrative styles (Lee, 1995) might be captured in the ways the participants explain mathematics concepts. Tangentially, I hope to construct findings that share mathematics educators and practitioners? positions towards these Black people?s understandings of the topics. Findings will convey whether the dispositions that they have towards BL speakers? mathematical prowess, as evident in their discussions of the topics, are generally favorable. My findings will help to prepare other teachers to listen to the substance that is in students? responses, and will help to support them in rethinking the ways that they might dismiss or try to supplant Black youth?s linguistic practices, and towards what end.

About Nickolaus Ortiz

Nickolaus Alexander Ortiz, Nickolaus for short, is a is a tenure track assistant professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education at Georgia State University. He is a 2018 graduate of Texas A&M University where he earned his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus in Mathematics Education. Following graduate work, Dr. Ortiz served as a post-doctoral research associate at Michigan State University. He is a product of {East} Atlanta, Georgia, where he taught high school mathematics for three years in a public school, and he continues to teach calculus each summer in Atlanta with the UpwardBound Program at Morehouse College. An emerging academic and experienced educator, Dr. Ortiz has been honored as a 2022 recipient of the Ernest D. Morrell Emerging Scholar Award and with the Early Career Publication Award from AERA’s Research in Mathematics Education SIG. His research focuses on how an ontological Blackness is manifested and/or stifled during high-quality mathematics instruction that emphasizes teaching for conceptual understanding, mathematics discourse, and cultural relevance. Specifically, he studies mathematics discourse and Black Language, and is actively theorizing about what it means to create a Black liberatory mathematics education that affirms these linguistic practices and Black people writ large. Last but not least, he is a musician (by hobby) who loves everything from Gladys Knight to OutKast, and one who theorizes the connections between music and mathematics in his approach to culturally relevant mathematics pedagogy.