For Molade Osibodu, creating what she calls “liberatory futures” begins in the mathematics classroom.
An associate professor of math education at żě˛ĄĘÓƵ’s Faculty of Education, Osibodu focuses her research on how Black students experience math and how education systems can better support equity.
“I want Black learners who enter a mathematics classroom to be fully, completely themselves instead of feeling like they don’t belong,” says Osibodu, who is keenly aware of the persistent and unfounded stereotypes about Black learners’ abilities in math – and how those beliefs intersect with Canada’s colonial legacy and history of immigration.
Osibodu’s teaching experience across three continents has fuelled her interest in and passion for addressing challenges faced by Black students in Canada. Before joining York, she taught secondary school mathematics in South Africa and later taught mathematics and mathematics education courses in the U.S. and Canada. Her research has since documented a range of obstacles faced by Black students in Canadian classrooms.
“It’s impossible to look at course syllabi without realizing that it’s important for equity to be at the core of the teaching practice,” she says. “My ultimate goal is to create math education where Black learners are thriving.”
A key aspect of her work is understanding how Black students experience math, which, in Canada, requires knowledge of the population’s demography. As her colleague Carl James, the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora at żě˛ĄĘÓƵ, has long emphasized, the Canadian Black community is diverse – including descendants who arrived via the Underground Railroad, families who immigrated from the Caribbean decades ago and more recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa – leading to a variety of educational experiences.
“It’s something I hope to explore,” Osibodu says. “In the United States, many scholars in mathematics education have studied the racialized experiences of Black learners and can trace these experiences through generations. In Canada, that isn’t the experience of most Africans, who are largely first-generation immigrants with a fairly young population.
African-born parents tend to be trusting of education systems, she notes. “I want to understand how these parents navigate the mathematics education of their children in the Canadian system. I want to collaborate with and support these parents with more tools to advocate for their children better.”
Osibodu is also examining how math education can address broader social and economic realities. Together with Alexandre Cavalcante at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, she has findings from their Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant exploring critical financial literacy among Black youth. The work highlights the importance of teaching financial literacy in response to Ontario’s 2020 mathematics curriculum, which introduced financial literacy expectations.
The research emphasizes that financial literacy should be taught through a systemic lens (e.g. discussing barriers to financial systems) rather than focusing exclusively on personal responsibility (e.g. budgeting).
Osibodu’s scholarship often draws on decoloniality as a theoretical and analytical lens, particularly for work directly connected to sub-Saharan Africa. One of her examined the impact of coloniality through the widespread use of the British-developed Cambridge Assessment International Education curriculum throughout anglophone Africa.
Across her work, Osibodu returns to the same principle for math education worldwide.
“It is imperative for equity to be at the core of a mathematics education practice and to constantly challenge deficit narratives about who belongs and who doesn’t,” Osibodu says. “We need to be very intentional in pushing against those narratives.”
With files from Elaine Smith