Pedagogy: 

• "Teachers are drawing on high-profile issues such as policing patterns, the spread of the pandemic, and campaign finance to explore math concepts from place value to proportionality and algebraic functions."

• This article examines teachers' negative and positive opinions in regards to encorparating social justice in mathematics classrooms

• It examines different ways to encorporate social justice into math lessons and how some topics may be easier to tie to social justice than others

• The main teaching strategy discussed was encorporating social justice into word problems

Implementation:

• Using word problems that have to do with money and poverty

• For example, in algebra I could use a problem such as: “Taylor’s income is modeled by the expression 13x + 50 where x is the number of hours she works. How many hours does Taylor have to work in a year to not be considered in poverty (one person is considered in poverty if they make $12,880 or less in the United States).”

Pedagogy:

• This article explains how one teacher explored the issue of. fracking in her mathematics classroom

• She taught the students what fracking was and had them brainstorm and answer questions about fracking using the mathematical skills they had learned in class

• Once they were done, students reflected on what the lesson taught them about fracking and about math in the real world

Implementation:

• Have students choose an aspect of a social issue (that is discussed in class for understanding purposes) to explore mathematically

  • make sense of messy information

• Ask how they think math could be useful in the issue?

• Brainstorm questions and choose one question per group to explore mathematically

• Guide my students to help them find how to use math to answer their question

• Have students present their findings and reflect on the project overall

Pedagogy:

• There is a correlation between numeracy and justice

• It is important to define what social justice is

• In Queens, NY, where the author worked, they started to realize that the children have low numeracy

• Never bore students, you cannot inspire bored students

• There were examples of numeracy in newspaper shown in the class to show how numeracy connects to the real world

• You can look at data from different years to see changes

• The teacher encorporated games, such as a game they called knaves or fools where students would decide if data was misleading and if it was misleading wether it was intentional

Implementation:

• When teaching numeracy or statistics, I can use data from recent years that adress certain social justice issues, such as the data provided on the side

  • By doing this it will hopefully keep students engaged and also teach students about the world of social justice issues that surround them

• I also plan to adapt the knaves or fools game mentioned in the article if I ever teach statistics or numeracy because it is a game where students get to analyze important data and how people can sway data for different reasons

  • In addition to this, I hope to make more games where my students can explore social justice issue by using math skills in a game format