RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
The Politics of Aesthetics of Mathematical Coherence: STEM Students’ Aesthetic Interpretations of Cross-Curricular Stories
Page: 858
As part of a larger participatory, arts-based study, six STEM students engaged in sustained arts creation and reflection across their curricular experiences as a form of holistic, multimodal, and multisensory aesthetic critique of their cross-curricular mathematical experiences. In this contributed report, I detail instances where students’ perspectives on curricular coherence (i.e., their aesthetics of coherence) deviated from privileged forms of disciplinary (logico-rational) coherence in mathematics education. In doing so, I highlight the exclusionary politics of aesthetics that result from a narrow adherence to one perspective of curricular coherence and the epistemic harm this can inflict on students in relation to how they position themselves as learners and doers of mathematics. These examples suggest a need for additional criticality concerning our often-unquestioned definitions of curricular coherence and acknowledgement that mathematical coherence seeking is governed by both aesthetic and logical forces.