Biography
Nicole M. Joseph is an associate professor with tenure of mathematics education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University. She is also an associate dean in the Peabody Office of Student Life. She directs the Joseph Mathematics Education Research Lab (JMEL), an intergenerational lab that focuses on training and mentoring its members on Black Feminist and intersectional epistemological orientations. Using critical perspectives, JMEL produces theoretical and methodological scholarship that challenges hegemonic notions of objectivity to emphasize more humanizing, empowering, and transformative research. Dr. Joseph’s research explores two lines of inquiry, (a) Black women and girls, their identity development, and their experiences in mathematics and (b) gendered anti-blackness, whiteness, white supremacy and how these systems of oppression shape Black girls’ learning, access, underrepresentation, and retention in mathematics across the pipeline. Her scholarship is published in top-tiered journals such as Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, and the Journal of Negro Education. Her latest book with Harvard Education Press is called Making Black Girls Count in Math Education: A Black Feminist Vision of Transformative Teaching. She is also the founder and director of Black Girls Becoming Summer Research Institute, a two-week residential program at Vanderbilt for rising 7th and 8th grade Black girls focused on a holistic STEAM curriculum. Her most recent funded project includes co-designing and validating a measure of mathematics identity that includes intersectionality-barriers and intersectionality-assets. Dr. Joseph designed this measure with adolescent Black girls ages 8-13 and has worked to collaborate with districts to support the mathematics achievement and identity of all Black girls.Media Appearances
-
Encouraging Black Girls to Bring a Bold Voice to Mathematics
One day, when Nicole M. Joseph was in the third grade, she raised her hand in class to answer a math question. The teacher did not call on her. Her mother happened to be standing outside the door observing the classroom and was unhappy about what she saw. It seemed to her that Nicole, a Black girl, was being ignored by her teacher, a white woman. So she saw to it that her daughter moved to a different class — an advanced class. That little girl went on to study math and economics in college, then became a math teacher and a teacher-coach. Today, Joseph is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University and the director of the Joseph Mathematics Education Research Lab. EdSurge recently talked with Joseph about her new book, “Making Black Girls Count in Math Education.” It shares findings from her research about the experiences Black girls and women have when it comes to math education, and it lays out what she describes as “a Black feminist vision for transformative teaching.”January 26th, 2023
-
Girls’ superb verbal skills may contribute to the gender gap in math
“Society still feels like girls are not as smart, or should not be in math,” says Nicole Joseph, a mathematics education expert at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study.July 15th, 2019
-
How Black Girls Benefit When Math has Social Interaction and Ways to Learn Together
While these kinds of math experiences could happen to any student, for Black girls, they compound with other biases and barriers to creating an outsider status in the classroom, according to Nicole Joseph, a Vanderbilt University professor who specializes in Black girls’ education. She is also a former math teacher. She said for Black girls, “just being positioned as a mathematical thinker is difficult and very rare in your average public classroom across this country.”March 9th, 2020
-
5 Ways Society Sabotages Girls' Interest In Science And Math
Dr. Nicole Joseph is an Assistant Professor of mathematics and science education at Vanderbilt University. She recently delivered a thought-provoking lecture at the University of Georgia-hosted workshop called "Navigating STEM." Her lecture inspired me to explore five reasons girls avoid entry into STEM-related fields.June 9th, 2019
-
Keeping Girls in STEM: 3 Barriers, 3 Solutions
Additionally, research “has clearly [indicated] that black girls view themselves as outsiders in mathematics and teachers view them as outsiders,” says Nicole Joseph, assistant professor of mathematics and science education at Vanderbilt University. Joseph points to tracking in math, more common in middle and high school than in the humanities, as a key structure infused with bias that restricts access to rigorous math education for black students.March 12th, 2019
-
15 Black Women Who Are Paving The Way In STEM And Breaking Barriers
“There is significant underrepresentation,” says Nicole M. Joseph, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the author of the upcoming book Mathematizing Feminism: Black Girls’ and Women’s Experiences in the P-20 Mathematics Pipelines. “We need to disrupt our own negative experiences that we had in school around mathematics…. We need to tell our girls that they can do math.”February 13th, 2018
-
The Sistah Network Support Group at the University of Denver
Nicole M. Joseph, an assistant professor in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver, has developed the Sistah Network, an organization that acts as a support group for Black women graduate students at the university.March 24th, 2015
Multimedia
Education
Ph.D., University of Washington
M.A., Pacific Oaks College Northwest
B.A., Seattle University
Additional Resources
Normalizing Black Girls' Humanity in Mathematics Classrooms
The sistah network: Enhancing the educational and social experiences of Black women in the academy
24/7 BROADCAST STUDIO
VUStar is a broadcast facility that links experts to you 24/7. The studio offers HD and SD transmission and an ISDN line for radio interviews. The studio, staffing and phone lines are free when using Vanderbilt experts.