Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Teachers College Educational ...

Credibility of Culturally Situated Design Tools:
Mathematics and Black Identity
Raymond Lutzky,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 Eighth Street, Troy, NY
Email: lutzkr3@rpi.edu
Abstract: Social identities and stereotypes of Black culture significantly impact education
and student learning in American schools (Ogbu and Simons, 1998; Steele et al., 2002),
Strategies to combat these social paradigms, such as “peer proofing” of students, may
only serve to exacerbate the racial divide between black and white and further alienate
African-American students from their own social identities (Fordham, 1991). This has led
to a variety of observable phenomena that negatively impact African-Americans’ selfidentity,
self-confidence, and academic ability. Some have described the cultural
implications of a student being accused of “acting white,” and the consequences within
American educational settings (Fryer and Torelli, 2005; Bucholtz, 2001). Unique teaching
strategies, such as the use of culturally situated design tools (CSDT Web site, 2012),
may hold the key in providing African-American students with a way to achieve academic
success without alienating themselves from their Black peers and cultural identification
(Eglash, 2005). This paper seeks to evaluate culturally situated design tools associated
with Black identity to determine the means by which they achieve credibility with their
audiences and improve student learning.
Black Identity and Education
Social psychological processes play a significant role in the academic underperformance of stigmatized
minority groups (Steele et al., 2002). This is the essence of “stereotype threat,” as manifest in Steele’s
research using standardized test scores across different racial groups:
When a negative stereotype about a group that one is part of becomes personally
relevant, usually as an interpretation of one’s behavior or an experience one is having,
stereotype threat is the resulting sense that one can then be judged or treated in terms of
the stereotype or that one might do something that would inadvertently confirm it. (Steele
et al., 2002, p. 389)
Particularly among African Americans, stereotype threat is a very real phenomenon. For example, it has
been demonstrated that stereotype threat influences the thought processes and academic performance of
students – in instances where African-American students believe they are being compared to a White
group, they provided more stereotypical and self-doubting answers than a control group of the same race.
“Simply expecting to take an ability-diagnostic test was enough to activate racial stereotypes about ability
in the minds of Black participants,” (Steele et al., 2002). An analysis of Black identity and its relationship
to education is required for a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, and the strategies of American
schools to combat it.
The Black identity of African-American students is a complex and evolving psychological paradigm. One
relevant theory is that of fictive kinship, which Fordham addresses in her ethnography of Black
adolescents in American schools. “Fictive kinship indicates a kinshiplike relationship between persons not
related by blood or marriage, who also have some reciprocal social or economic relationship,” (Fordham,
1991). This notion conveys the “peoplehood” of Black social identity, and she goes on to describe the
challenges for this identity in modern American schools. However, traditional American institutions of
education have approached instruction through racially-motivated instances of “peer-proofing,” negatively
affecting students’ identity as Black people. This is evidenced (and exacerbated) by a tendency to
remove high-achieving Black students and place them away from their Black peers into nearly all-White
environments. Fordham notes that this separation in of itself suggests that “they are, in some important
intellectual and nonintellectual ways, different from other Black people and, with the possible exception of
phenotypical (or racial) features, clones of their White peers,” (Fordham 1991). This is reinforced by
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