RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
(Re)Humanizing Mathematics for Historically Minoritized Learners: Narratives of Community College Students in Noncredit Bearing Developmental Math
Page: 1167
While many community college (CC) students come to higher education with specific career or life goals, these aspirations may be forced to change if students are not able to get past the gatekeeper of developmental mathematics. Racially minoritized students are disproportionately tracked into developmental mathematics classes upon entering CC, and often become trapped in a financial and emotional cycle of take-fail-repeat, with student debt linked back to developmental coursework totaling over $1.3 billion per year across the U.S. (Jimenez, Sargrad, Morales, & Thompson, 2016). This report presents a subset of data from a larger narrative inquiry project that focuses on humanizing stories from an intimate group of CC students, uncovering how they came to know themselves as learners and doers of mathematics. Findings provide insight into how mathematics learning experiences can function to dehumanize, while also paving the way to creating more humanizing undergraduate mathematics learning spaces.