Latinx Bilingual Students' Perseverance on a Mathematical Task: A Rehumanizing Perspective

Abstract

We draw on a rehumanizing perspective that covets a student-centered viewpoint around the discipline of mathematics. For Latinx bilinguals, we posit that a translanguaging practice is a vital option by which collective perseverance during problem solving can be sustained and leveraged for meaningful learning. This study explores and examines the collaborative efforts of a group of Latinx twelfth-grade students persevering to make meaning of an exponential relationship. We employed a discursive thematic analysis of this groups’ ongoing engagement with a challenging mathematical task, paying specific attention to the ways in which these bilingual students encountered and overcame mathematical obstacles and setbacks. Our findings suggest that Latinx bilingual students can spontaneously and dialogically leverage communicative resources to help persevere with in-the-moment obstacles and build mathematical understandings. We argue for the development of more explicit translanguaging support systems in mathematics classrooms to privilege the viewpoint and experiences of the student, and the ways in which they develop mathematical understandings.