Abstract
In this study, I begin to address two main overarching goals. The first is to investigate how statistics is being constructed as a discipline in secondary mathematics curriculum. The second is to (re)envision a literacy based perspective of statistics that shows how it can be a powerful means to address sociopolitical issues, such as racial profiling, poverty, food distribution, or environmental pollution in the mathematics classroom and to use it as a lens to contrast the view of statistics that is being constructed in the mathematics curriculum. Towards the first goal, I draw from Foucault (1972) and his methodology of Archeology to investigate how statistics is constructed as a discipline in two of the predominant high school mathematics textbooks series. More specifically, I investigate how the two textbook series form the actions appropriate for the doing of statistics and how the contextualized situations appropriate for such actions are materialized in the discourse of the text. Towards the second goal, I intersect ideas from critical literacy with those of statistical literacy to propose a critical statistical literacy, situated in the goal of education being democratic equality helping to prepare students to be active critical citizens in society. I report findings relative to the first goal and then use the critical statistical literacy framework I propose to then serve as a contracting perspective to evaluate the findings relative to the first goal of this study. I end with a discussion of the findings and possible future directions for this work and its contributions to both mathematics and statistics education..