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By: Brandon Chen
This resource is a website including a solid definition of the issues of social justice in math as well as examples which give support for the need for reform. Ultimately, the main focus is high-quality math education with an emphasis on higher achievement for typically lower-performing individuals as well as uncovering hidden biases within questions and teaching. Even if the teaching is not 100% math related, the stress on giving outside information and putting the question in perspective is important for interpretation.
One teaching strategy of this resource focuses on lesson planning for new and old teachers. The three steps to this lesson planning strategy are Adapt, Math, and Current. “Adapt” refers to the importance of keeping information relevant is important for social justice as the world is always changing and constant improvement will ultimately increase the quality of teaching. They recommend utilizing bits and pieces from existing plans to make it easier on the teacher. “Math” is identifying the curriculum topic you want to cover. Finally, “Current” is the implementation of a social injustice or culturally relevant topic that is important to yourself and your students to keep them engaged and progressive. This strategy seems easy to do as well as a good way to keep students wanting to explore more and maybe better remember the information
Lisa Harrison undergoes a self examination of teaching social justice to middle schoolers in Brooklyn. As a guest teacher, she implemented different methods of social justice to spread awareness in topics of food insecurity and racial separation. Her biggest takeaway from this experience was the students' lack of understanding of what social justice was. She marked it up to the limited exposure throughout their schooling but she did note that they inherently know what was wrong and right in a sense but could not articulate on it.
The strategy used here was overexposure. In this, the teacher’s question has a very specific math topic that they want covered but the context is heavily laced with an issue, in this case food insecurity. This not only teaches the student about the necessary curriculum material but the question itself informs and can sometimes make the room uncomfortable with it. The question also may throw in an additional point that furthers conversation about the topic. This opens up the room to more than math but how the math can be used to solve the problem or discuss it to spread awareness. For example, she gives a long word problem with lots of statistics on food insecurity and first asked for the average meat that is consumed by families and the follow up was “is this a problem and why or why not?”. This forced the students to think about what their answer truly represents and creates a productive conversation which inspires and informs.
Personally, I think this strategy is one of the better ones as math is typically viewed as the boring class that only deals with numbers with no meaning behind it as people come to the conclusion they will never use this knowledge in their futures. By using uncomfortable topics and numbers, it forces students to critically think about their lives and what their numbers mean and why they are using them in the first place.
This article explains the importance as well as a well thought out strategy to include more topics and information regarding social justice in the math classroom. As well as building a more informed society, it also creates a better sense of community between the school and surrounding factors.
The development ideas used here are based upon the students’ wants and interests. Using things that either affect or interest students can be a way to further spark their thoughts and allow for better focus. Along with that, it supports connecting with the local community as a way to make the students away from the issues that might persist around them but have no ideas. These issues might be able to be studied more heavily or solved using mathematics which leads in the final step which is the inclusion of a specific math topic. Analyzing and manipulating data, comparing solutions’ effectiveness and other things are all ways to implement math into these topics and it can help students learn and engage with the material more openly.
In a future class, I would get to know the area I was teaching in and try to see what some of the biggest problems in that area are. Using this information, I could get a feel for which were the biggest concerns of my students and teach a lesson about it. It’s very important to be aware of your surrounding community and be cautious of the issues that could affect you one day.
Radical Math is a website dedicated to the support of teachers who are actively trying to teach social justice in their classes. They have a wide range of resources including lesson plans, books, infographics, presentations and some other things. In each of these categories, they have a wide range of sensitive topics that could be talked about from drugs to AIDS.
One of these examples uses a strategy that uses math as a wow-factor to exemplify the seriousness of a problem. In the fields of graphing and statistics, a teacher might start the class with an unrelated diagram which has little to no impact on the students. They can do any sort of math on the data set that is necessary for the curriculum and then interpret their answers. Now after this, you can do the same exercise but with a topic with much more meaning like the spread of AIDS. Although the math is the same, the information used has a much bigger impact and can take some students by shock. This puts a large emphasis on math and how it can be used to diagram the hardships of the world and why it is important to learn about these topics.
I really like this idea and can see it used in a plethora of ways. I feel the juxtaposition between math with only numbers and math with real human lives has a tremendous impact on how students learn and how much they want to continue to explore a topic.
This website has the goal to “humanize math” and expresses this through real life examples to bring the numbers to life. One of their strategies for doing this is reflection of both the student and the teacher.
The insight offered says to ask students questions about their relationship to math and some other more thought provoking questions rather than calculations. On top of this, ideas of identity and diversity should also be discussed as, along with any other subject or thing in the world, each person views math differently and has biases accordingly. Because of this it is important to know who each of us are and how we can remove as many biases as possible. Teachers are also recommended to do this as they can learn a lot about themselves and how or what they teach or place emphasis on. Through this, teachers can then include math with more serious matters in the world and people can have insightful conversations with as little bias as possible.
I can imagine using this idea as an icebreaker in class one day. The mundane of math is a common feeling for many high school students and I think the change of perspective could help focus their attention and open their minds to the different types of math views.
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