When multiple pathways become unequal: curricular navigational justice and the work of mathematical pathway-making

Curricula oriented towards inclusion offer multiple entry points, representations, languages, strategies, and modes of expression, yet multiplicity does not ensure usable or consequential pathways. This article develops curricular navigational justice as an integrative mid-range framework and a distributional dimension of curricular justice. It examines how pathway constitution, continuation, disciplinary validation, institutional legitimation, and repair are allocated, recognized, and made consequential across curriculum enactment. Using problem-driven conceptual framework development, the article adapts rhizomatic and rhizocurricular accounts, compares rival explanations, and tests boundary cases. The framework organizes mechanisms from curriculum making, pedagogic discourse, epistemic justice, and navigation around the pathway-making episode. It distinguishes six analytical moments, examines the distribution of responsibility, authority, support, recognition, and consequences, and separates disciplinary, participatory, and institutional viability. Its distinctive inference is temporal and cross-site mismatch: a curriculum may appear inclusive at entry yet become unjust when transition and repair work is displaced onto learners before disciplinary or evaluative consequences. Mathematics is revealing because heterogeneous routes must preserve warranted conceptual relations. Curricular navigational injustice requires consequential pathway-making work, patterned allocation, adverse consequences, and a feasible alternative preserving the curricular object; hidden requirements and non-recognition are supporting, not sufficient, indicators.