Over the last two decades, the concept of mathematical identity has gained increased attention. Among others, socioculturally available narratives about mathematics and mathematicians play an important role in offering identities to align with or reject. In this paper, we explore the genre of picturebooks about mathematicians and mathematics. Our findings indicate that picturebooks propagate the following perceptions: doing mathematics is individual, fevered, mysterious, and intuitive; people who love mathematics are precocious; mathematical talent is rare, innate and effortless; and mathematics can have negative social and emotional consequences both for those who are good at it and those who are not.

Bio:

Olga O. Fellus holds a PhD in Education and two Master’s degrees (in Education and in Translation and Interpreting). She has many years of experience teaching classroom discourse, research methods, statistics, and EAP. Olga’s research centers on mathematics education and the construction of learners’ identities as doers and users of mathematics.

David E. Low is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at California State University, Fresno. He conducts research on how young people’s multimodal reading and composing practices facilitate various enactments of critical literacy.

Alex Kasman held postdoc positions at MSRI in Berkeley and CRM in Montréal, and has been a math professor at the College of Charleston since 1999. He has published over 30 research papers in math, physics and biology journals, a textbook on soliton theory and a book of mathematically themed short stories.

Ralph Mason is a professor of education at the University of Manitoba. He hopes that learning experiences with literature-triggered mathematics might be authentically mathematical and educationally significant—whatever that might mean!

Lynette Guzmán is an Assistant Professor of STEM Education at California State University, Fresno. Her scholarship investigates how prospective teachers interrogate discourses related to mathematics and identity. Her most recent work explores how digital media could be used as transformative educational tools to examine critical perspectives on global issues.