Negotiating the structural and personal intensities of gender, affects and whiteness through culturally responsive becoming in mathematics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Marked by growing cultural diversity of the student body alongside education policies grounded in whiteness, the Australian education system is both evolving while tethered to past and ongoing colonial power. Amidst these tensions, we are concerned with how schools and teachers become culturally responsive. Most Australian teachers are not only White but female, thus the White female teacher’s relation to the culturally diverse learner is structural. Utilising life history methodology, we explore how White female mathematics teacher, ‘Lara’ negotiates these relations in a learning area synonymous with exclusion. We argue: 1) culturally responsive becoming in White Australia involves disrupting whiteness; 2) whiteness in the educational encounter is not only raced but gendered and so too is school mathematics; 3) disrupting the exclusivity of mathematics has broader implications. The paper contributes to Australian scholarship on culturally responsive schooling by bringing whiteness and gender more sharply to the fore.