Mathematics for social justice

Last updated

Mathematics for social justice is a pedagogical approach to mathematics education that seeks to incorporate lessons from critical mathematics pedagogy and similar educational philosophies into the teaching of mathematics at schools and colleges. The approach tries to empower students on their way to developing a positive mathematics identity and becoming active, numerically literate citizens who can navigate and participate in society. [1] [2] Mathematics for social justice puts particular emphasis on overcoming social inequalities. [3] Its proponents, for example, Bob Moses, [4] may understand numerical literacy as a civil right. Many of the founders of the movement, e.g. Eric Gutstein, were initially mathematics teachers, [5] but the movement has since expanded to include the teaching of mathematics at colleges and universities. [6] Their educational approach is influenced by earlier critical pedagogy advocates such as Paulo Freire and others. [7] Mathematics for social justice has been criticised, however, its proponents argue that it both fits into existing teaching frameworks and promotes students' success in mathematics. [8]

Contents

Mathematics for social justice often overlaps with other approaches to mathematics education, the practice and research of mathematics, including ethics in mathematics [9] and ethnomathematics. [10] Common to these approaches is that they can be understood as a sociopolitical turn in mathematics. [11]

Criticism

Pedagogical approaches incorporating issues of social justice into mathematics classrooms have been heavily criticised by some mathematicians and educators. [12] They argue that mathematics is neutral and that its education and research should be separated from issues of social justice. [13] [14] Balancing the requirements of a mathematical education that teaches students mathematical skills and social justice can be difficult. [15] Some of its opponents use this to argue against mathematics for social justice because it would necessarily come at the expense of teaching mathematical knowledge. [16]

Eric Gutstein's book Rethinking Mathematics has been said to calculate controversy [17] and to unnecessarily bring partisan politics into mathematics. The criticism is shared with other works in this area.

See also

Related Research Articles

Science education is the teaching and learning of science to school children, college students, or adults within the general public. The field of science education includes work in science content, science process, some social science, and some teaching pedagogy. The standards for science education provide expectations for the development of understanding for students through the entire course of their K-12 education and beyond. The traditional subjects included in the standards are physical, life, earth, space, and human sciences.

In mathematics education, ethnomathematics is the study of the relationship between mathematics and culture. Often associated with "cultures without written expression", it may also be defined as "the mathematics which is practised among identifiable cultural groups". It refers to a broad cluster of ideas ranging from distinct numerical and mathematical systems to multicultural mathematics education. The goal of ethnomathematics is to contribute both to the understanding of culture and the understanding of mathematics, and mainly to lead to an appreciation of the connections between the two.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematics education</span> Mathematics teaching, learning and scholarly research

In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paulo Freire</span> Brazilian educator (1921–1997)

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016 according to Google Scholar.

The anti-bias curriculum is a curriculum which attempts to challenge prejudices such as racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, weightism, homophobia, classism, colorism, heightism, handism, religious discrimination and other forms of kyriarchy. The approach is favoured by civil rights organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League.

Culturally relevant teaching or responsive teaching is a pedagogy grounded in teachers' practice of cultural competence, or skill at teaching in a cross-cultural or multicultural setting. Teachers using this method encourage each student to relate course content to their cultural context.

Claudia Zaslavsky was an American mathematics teacher and ethnomathematician.

Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding.

Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers is a 2005 book edited by Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson, advocating a mathematics education curriculum that intertwines mathematics with social justice. The various essays in the book, including "Home Buying While Brown or Black" and "Sweatshop Accounting", advocate using social-justice issues to motivate the teaching of rigorous mathematical concepts, and the use of mathematics education as a way of promoting ideas of social justice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational practices</span>

Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.

Critical mathematics pedagogy is an approach to mathematics education that includes a practical and philosophical commitment to liberation. Approaches that involve critical mathematics pedagogy give special attention to the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of oppression, as they can be understood through mathematics. They also analyze the role that mathematics plays in producing and maintaining potentially oppressive social, political, cultural or economic structures. Finally, critical mathematics pedagogy demands that critique is connected to action promoting more just and equitable social, political or economic reform.

Critical pedagogy of place is a curricular approach to education that combines critical pedagogy and place-based education. It started as an attitude and approach to place-based and land-based education that criticized place-based education's invisible endorsement of colonial narratives and domineering relationships with the land. The scholars critiquing place-based education mainly focused on re-centering Indigenous voices in the curriculum. In the early 1990s, C.A. Bowers advocated for a critical pedagogy of place that acknowledged our enmeshment in cultural and ecological systems, and the resulting need for this to figure in the school curriculum. In 2003, David A. Greenwood introduced and defined the term "Critical Pedagogy of Place." In the years since, the general ideas of critical pedagogy of place have been incorporated into many scholars' critiques of place-based, land-based, and environmental education.

Ethics in mathematics is an emerging field of applied ethics, the inquiry into ethical aspects of the practice and applications of mathematics. It deals with the professional responsibilities of mathematicians whose work influences decisions with major consequences, such as in law, finance, the military, and environmental science. When understood in its socio-economic context, the development of mathematical works can lead to ethical questions ranging from the handling and manipulation of big data to questions of responsible mathematisation and falsification of models, explainable and safe mathematics, as well as many issues related to communication and documentation. The usefulness of a Hippocratic oath for mathematicians is an issue of ongoing debate among scholars. As an emerging field of applied ethics, many of its foundations are still highly debated. The discourse remains in flux. Especially the notion that mathematics can do harm remains controversial.

Arthur Bakker is a Dutch mathematics education researcher and associate professor at the Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, Netherlands. He is Fellow at the University of Bremen.

Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.

Abolitionist teaching, also known as abolitionist pedagogy, is a set of practices and approaches to teaching that focus on restoring humanity and pursuing educational freedom for all children in schools. It is rooted in Black critical theory. The term was coined by author and professor Bettina Love.

Douglas H. Clements is an American scholar in the field of early mathematics education. Previously a preschool and kindergarten teacher, his research centers on the learning and teaching of early mathematics, computer applications for mathematics teaching, and scaling up successful educational interventions. Clements has contributed to the writing of educational standards including the Common Core State Standards, the NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics and the NCTM's 2006 Curriculum Focal Points for Prekindergarten through Grade 8 Mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erna Beth Yackel</span> American college professor (1939–2022)

Erna Beth Seecamp Yackel was an American college professor and math educator. She was a member of the faculty at Purdue University Northwest from 1984 to 2004.

A math walk, or math trail, is a type of themed walk in the US, where direct experience is translated into the language of mathematics or abstract mathematical sciences such as information science, computer science, decision science, or probability and statistics. Some sources specify how to create a math walk whereas others define a math walk at a specific location such as a junior high school or in Boston. The journal The Mathematics Teacher includes a special section titled "Mathematical Lens" in many issues with the metaphor of lens capturing seeing the world as mathematics.

Susan Baker Empson is an American scholar of mathematics education whose work includes longitudinal studies of children's mathematical development, the use of Cognitively Guided Instruction in mathematics education, analyses of childhood understanding of the concept of fractions, and research on the professional development of mathematics educators. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Missouri, where she held the Richard Miller endowed chair of mathematics education.

References

  1. ↑ Gutstein, Eric (2003). "Teaching and Learning Mathematics for Social Justice in an Urban, Latino School". Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. 34 (1): 37–73. doi:10.2307/30034699. JSTOR   30034699.
  2. ↑ Frankenstein, Marilyn (2006). "Reading the World with Math". Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers (Eric Gutstein, Ed.).
  3. ↑ Gutstein, Eric (2006). Reading And Writing The World With Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice. Routledge. ISBN   9780415950848.
  4. ↑ Moses, Robert (2002). Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi. Beacon Press. ISBN   9780807031278.
  5. ↑ Buell, Catherine A.; Shulman, Bonnie (2019). "An Introduction to Mathematics for Social Justice". PRIMUS. 29 (3–4): 205–209. doi: 10.1080/10511970.2018.1530707 . ISSN   1051-1970.
  6. ↑ Karaali, Gizem; Khadjavi, Lily (2019). Mathematics for Social Justice: Resources for the College Classroom. MAA Press: An Imprint of the American Mathematical Society. ISBN   978-1-4704-4926-1.
  7. ↑ Stinson, D.; Bidwell, C.R.; Powell, G.C. (2012). "Critical pedagogy and teaching mathematics for social justice". The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. 4 (1): 76–94.
  8. ↑ Dover, Alison George (2009). "Teaching for Social Justice and K-12 Student Outcomes: A Conceptual Framework and Research Review". Equity & Excellence in Education. 42 (4): 506–524. doi:10.1080/10665680903196339. ISSN   1066-5684. S2CID   145272026.
  9. ↑ Buell, Catherine; Piercey, Victor (2022). "Special Issue on Ethics in Mathematics". Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. 12 (2). doi: 10.5642/jhummath.KXCU6801 . S2CID   252698507.
  10. ↑ D’Ambrosio, Ubiratan (2007). "PEACE, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND ETHNOMATHEMATICS". The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast. 1.2007.
  11. ↑ Gutiérrez, Rochelle (2013). "The Sociopolitical Turn in Mathematics Education". Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. 44 (1): 37–68. doi:10.5951/jresematheduc.44.1.0037. ISSN   0021-8251.
  12. ↑ Fortin, Jacey. "California Tries to Close the Gap in Math, but Sets Off a Backlash". nytimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  13. ↑ Crowell, Rachel. "New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field". Scientific American. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  14. ↑ "Opinion | In California, 2+2=4 May Be Thought Racist". Wall Street Journal. 2021-05-24. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  15. ↑ Bartell, Tonya Gau (2013). "Learning to Teach Mathematics for Social Justice: Negotiating Social Justice and Mathematical Goals". Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. 44 (1): 129–163. doi:10.5951/jresematheduc.44.1.0129. ISSN   0021-8251.
  16. ↑ Kang, Jay Caspian (2022-11-15). "How Math Became an Object of the Culture Wars". The New Yorker. ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 2023-08-13.
  17. ↑ "NEA: April 2006 NEA Today - Up Front". 2007-09-30. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2023-08-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.