“I Don’t Have the Same Rainbow Every Single Day”: Dignity and Personhood in High School Mathematics

This article argues that centering dignity in analyses of mathematics classroom activity serves as a necessary rejoinder to histories of oppression, domination, and subjectification baked into US-based schooling and rife in school-based mathematics education. Defining dignity using Lloyd’s definition of dignity as struggle against domination, I add a literature-based Framework for Axiomatic Dignity in Mathematics Learning as a heuristic for considering the practices, positions, and micro-enactments of dignity evidenced in one classroom. Situated in a year of ethnographic research in one mathematics classroom at a predominantly Latine-serving high school in California, this article examines how conditions of possibility for dignity might be organized into classroom life and how minoritized youth participate in micro-enactments of dignity in school mathematics spaces. Findings revealed that even in a classroom where instructional practices and local positions strongly aligned with storylines of students as community members, learners, and mathematical thinkers, students at times resisted or renegotiated classroom expectations, particularly if the mathematical thinker storyline might compromise one of the other two. This article contributes to the learning sciences and mathematics education to articulate dignity as a productive analytic lens and better understand what, where, and how dignity may exist in the school-based mathematics classroom.