WHAT DO MATH TEXTBOOKS TEACH US?
This project was started as part of workshops hosted by the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in October 2022, where we were faced with the broad task of analyzing our relationship with the known and unknown to create works for Civic City's project School of Not Knowing (Scuola del non sapere).
After choosing the topic of gender issues, we began our research by going through Polish textbooks for religion, family life education, and mathematics, and finding sexist quotes. Before our research, we had already assumed that textbooks for religion studies and family life education would contain questionable statements enforcing gender roles, however finding it in something as innocuous as math textbooks illustrations was jarring. With the more narrowed down focus already decided, we continued our work by going through the two series of math textboks currently used in Poland in grades four through eight of primary school.
We found that women made up only a third of 1613 human figures observed, while people of color made up only four percent and were almost always depicted in a stereotypical and offensive manner. Across all thirteen books we examined, only two disabled figures were found, both depicted in wheelchairs, and no transgender or gender non-conforming persons appeared.
Three posters were created: the one shown above, showcasing our research data on the representation of various professions in these textbooks; the one shown below, focused on social functions as they were presented in these textbooks; and the final one, focused on the representation of "imaginary careers."
