The primary goal of this dissertation is to shed light on a complex and persistent phenomenon in the mathematics education pipeline: disproportionately high student enrollment rates in remedial mathematics courses--particularly among entering, African American college students. As data have indicated throughout the past few decades, African Americans and other students of color have been disproportionately "gate-kept" upon matriculation to four-year universities and relegated to introductory courses that flank the shallowest end of the postsecondary mathematics curriculum. The present, mainly qualitative study was situated in a remedial mathematics course at a large, Midwestern university. Drawing on phenomenology and case study as the main research strategies, I investigated the following questions: (a) What mathematics identities do students construct while enrolled and participating in a remedial mathematics course? (b) How are students engaging academically and with mathematics, in particular? (c) How do students' mathematics identities relate to their engagement?During a five-month period, extensive classroom observations in the university's lowest-level, "remedial" mathematics course were conducted, with a focus on noting norms, regular activities, and patterns of interaction among the students and instructors. The primary findings are centered on the academic transitions of four, principal "case" participants. To supplement the ethnographic research, I conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with each case study participant to allow students--in their own voices--to discuss the factors that influenced their mathematics education and learning trajectories during their transitions as first-year university students. Based on narrative analyses of many hours of interview data, I began to evince and advance a central finding: The conventional perspectives are extremely limited explanations, particularly with regard to who the students in remedial mathematics courses are (or tend to be), what supports they have, or how they choose to support their own achievement. The latter chapters concentrate on the experiences of two students and their negotiation of various socialization forces and processes. Although the primary subject of these conversations with the students was mathematics and the nature of their mathematics experiences, they often discussed the intersecting nature of their various other identities (e.g., as sons or daughters, as first-generation students, as members of working-class families or communities) with their mathematics-specific identities. Most prominently, students openly discussed the racialized nature of their mathematics learning experiences--that is, what it meant to be African American in this particular mathematics-learning context. The students, I claimed, were also recognizing and negotiating identity contingencies in the environment (relating to social psychological research on the topic), in the form of masternarratives about African American participation in mathematics education settings. In the latter chapters, I discuss the empirical evidence and theoretical nature of these constructions and how students negotiated or worked against them. The dissertation closes with a discussion of students' agency (in the form of counternarratives) and implications for future research on the experiences of African American students in mathematics education.
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