This website contains five pedagogical resources specific to math. Each contains a summary, the examples of teaching strategies from the resource, and a description of how I imagine adopting this strategy in a future class.

The Pedagogy

Examples of teaching strategies can be seen in the class’ Displacement Unit, where students learned about subprime mortgages, affordability, and trends of house prices and losses among other topics. Students interpreted and graphed loan payments, interest, etc. The overall goal was for students to learn the broader cause and effect of displacement with regards to their community. Throughout the unit, the teacher hinted at patterns of racism and capitalism, but did so in a way such that students could make the connection.

Students were tasked with using linear regression to plot data points and find slope, intercepts, and other information which they had been taught before, but were now connecting the math with social problems such as displacement. The lessons ranged from teaching the concept and understanding the political and economic injustice. 

Students learned about mortgages through discussion and questions, as well as utilizing discrete dynamical systems (DDS) to understand how the numbers have affected their communities and continue to do so. Students answer questions about mortgages and interest  specifically tied to their community’s median income, one of the questions being if the family can afford the mortgage, or can afford to live in the community, based on their findings. 

Implementing the Strategy

In a future class, I imagine adopting this strategy by first understanding the themes present in the lives of my students. In order for them to read and write the world with mathematics, the curriculum must contain these themes and be flexible depending on students' responses through discussions. This strategy has also been shown to be successful if students and teachers co-create the environment for RWWM, which involves an important power relationship shift between student and teacher. 

Then I would present the topic with the students and allow them to ask questions related to math, such as percentages, probabilities, etc. Graph have been shown to improve students understanding, so I would task them with creating their models related to the issue at hand. 

The lesson would be very heavy in discussion, and the students would have the opportunity to present their finding, with their peers providing feedback and any questions to further their understanding. I would also guide their questions so that they challenge social inequality and seek change. 

The Pedagogy

Students are tasked with creating a model that represents the real world problems they are facing, using mathematics to analyze the result of the findings, and then improving the model with  their results. The goal of this form of teaching is for students to draw conclusions on their own, and to strengthen their ability to analyze relationships. 

An example from this article that contains this teaching strategy is seen through the lesson of Fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from earth (Hendrickson 2015). The issue is current in the community where the lesson was done, which is a high-poverty area where natural gas is found and companies are taking advantage of it. The start of the lesson involved asking questions pertaining to the topic of Fracking, especially asking about how much profit companies make out of the land and the effects it will have on the community’s future. 

Teacher provided students with worksheets which focused on incorporating math into the activity. Instead of providing the students with step by step problems about percentages, which would take away from the overall engagement with the topic, students were given the opportunities to explore any aspect of fracking by looking through websites and data on their own. Students were able to come to their decisions and allowed for engagement and learning opportunities, as well as asked questions they otherwise would not have come up with through worksheets. Students developed their own model to interpret the injustice happening in their community.  

To further connect the topic to math, the teachers guided the students through a series of questions, such as “How much waste is put underneath our water system with one well?” (Hendrickson 2015). Students created mathematical models that answered these questions and presented their findings. 

Implementing the Strategy

In a future class, I imagine adopting this strategy by introducing a topic to students that is prevalent in the community. Similar to fracking, I could integrate math within social problems such as displacement, policing, poverty, etc. I would give students an activity consisting of questions, which they could answer in groups using vocabulary they are learning in class. These questions are meant for students to form a deeper introduction in the social injustice and guide their mathematical understanding in relation to it. Students would then work in small groups to create models and graphs with trends. I would then guide the class in using the findings to answer questions about the problem in the future, and the effects it would have in the communities. 

The Pedagogy

Examples of teaching math for social justice involve utilizing culturally relevant pedagogy. Teachers use the process in which students share social concerns in their lives and communities, and strengthen their understanding through mathematics. 

An example of this strategy was in a co-taught lesson between math and social studies teacher candidates, titled “History of American Immigration through Different Types of Graphs.” Candidates presented immigration and population trends to implement in their lesson, as well as presented sources to back up the findings. The goal of this lesson was to further student understanding of societal injustice as well as learn about graphs, scales, units, etc. Candidates then used the information for students to make predictions based on the trends. 

Another example that implemented this teaching strategy was in the co-taught lesson called “Maps as a Story.” Candidates developed a lesson that allows students to compare maps and the proportions of countries. Students begin to understand the geography behind maps using mathematical skills such as proportionality. Students analyzed data of projection methods, and overall learned how to read maps in the form of a lesson that integrated both math and social studies. 

Implementing the Strategy

To adopt this strategy into a future class, I would focus on not being afraid of introducing in-depth discussion in the classroom, and instead integrate them with math. These include issues of immigrations, poverty, and social injustices that students observe in their everyday lives. I would allow students to reason and think through the problems instead of presenting rules on how to come to an answer. My goal would be for students to view social issues through a “mathematical lens.”

The Pedagogy

Teachers create lessons by drawing on issues pertaining to the nation's increased inequality, such as policing patterns, the effects of the pandemic, etc. In the process, students deepen their understanding of algebraic functions and the use of proportionality, as well as their overall understanding of the society issue at hand. The goal of this new instruction is to connect math to their students' lives, and critique the society they live in by using math as a way of change. 

In order to keep students involved, it is important that the topics are drawn up together with the students, and this can be found by allowing discussion in the math classroom. These discussions challenge the students to think about what a just society looks like, and allows them to get feedback from their families as well. The issue that they choose will hold importance to the students, which they can then explore with a mathematical lens. 

Implementing the Strategy

To adopt these strategies in class, I would guide a student discussion as a whole class or in big groups of students. It is important to understand the themes in students lives, and the topic for the unit would be determined based on group discussion, or by releasing a google form to allow students to choose anonymously. Once the social justice problem is chosen, the class would delve deeper into the topic, and their homework assignment would be retrieving information from their families and/or do further research on the web.