Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Teachers College Educational ...

esearch suggesting that many high-achieving Black students are accused of “acting White,” (Fryer and
Torelli, 2005; Bucholtz 2001).
As a result of this environment, most schools present an inversion of Black students’ fictive social identity
(Fordham, 1991) relating to boundary maintaining factors in social interactions with white students. This
mechanism allows Black students to identify “real” versus “spurious” members of their social group.
According to Bishop, incorporating cultural history and minimizing the perception that students must
“choose” between their Black identity and a desire for academic success are keys to avoiding dysfunction
and raising credibility in education (Fordham, 1991). Eglash’s culturally situated design tools (CSDTs)
rely on these two concepts, and the design of the technology works towards the cultural and historical
education of students while allowing them to maintain the identities (Eglash et al., 2009). His research
shows that this approach produces further benefits beyond enhancing student interest, such as
combating stereotypes, reinforcing student identity, and by combating notions of “primitivism” and raciallybased
theories of “natural ability.” He states that “African fractals in the classroom might help guard
against an overemphasis on biological determinism, which has been found adversely to affect
mathematics learning,” (Eglash, 2005). Clearly, the integration of credible multicultural material with
traditional American mathematics education produces many benefits to learning, student interest, and
social identity, and succeeds in capturing the attention of students and improving academic interest.
Eglash and his team and his team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a suite of culturally
situated design tools, or CSDTs, designed to generate enthusiasm and improve student learning in
mathematics within cultural and historical simulations.
These design tools draw considerable power from their credibility in the classroom. “CSDTs provide a
potent space for students to reconfigure their relations between culture, mathematics, and technology,
and for anthropologists to carry out research in these same domains,” (Eglash et al., 2009). These tools
explore the relationship between youth identity and culture through interactive software simulations of
cultural arts with underlying mathematical designs, coupled with historical context. They also have the
added benefit of helping students better relate to math concepts through the use of culturally-specific
imagery, and support key aspects of multicultural identity.
Credibility of Culturally Situated Design Tools
The credibility of CSDTs begins with context. According to Warnick, source credentials and reputation
have become less important in the credibility of online information. She argues that it is advisable “to
rethink the modernist conception of credibility as reliance on the message source and to a shift to a
framework for judging credibility of messages that arise in the context of a distributed field of production
oriented to specific purposes, functions, and values,” (Warnick, 2007). Therefore, part of the credibility of
CSDTs is their contextual notions of cultural heritage, visual design, and authoritative authorship (the
endorsement of the National Science Foundation is prominent on the CSDT main web site). In relation to
this, Fogg discusses how Web sites will have more credibility if they highlight the people or organization
behind the content and services provided. He also shows that credibility perceptions will be enhanced if a
Web site makes it easy for users to check outside sources to verify the accuracy of site content (Fogg,
2003). The CSDT web site accomplishes both of these tasks through references and by highlighting
authors and partner organizations. Fogg identifies this as reputed, or “third party” credibility. While most
users approach computing technology with “a preconceived notion about credibility, based on general
assumptions about what is and is not believable” (Fogg, 2003), they will re-evaluate their beliefs about the
credibility of a system after initial use and firsthand inspection.
Fogg contends that technology that is viewed as trustworthy will have increased powers of persuasion,
and that “sources that argue against their own interest are perceived as being credible,” (Fogg 123). The
user must also have a perception that the information they are receiving is fair and unbiased. This is
perhaps one of the most relevant and powerful sources of credibility for CSDTs: their incongruity with
traditional American education and relation to cultural identity. It is entirely possible for a student to
perceive that the approach of CSDTs, offering reinforcement to Black fictive kinship or other cultural
identifiers, is directly counter to the approach of their previous schooling. This also speaks to Fogg’s
47