Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers is a 2005 book (2nd edition 2013) 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.
Critics derided the work as an attempt to subvert mathematics education for partisan political purposes, while the authors defended it as a useful way to motivate a wide range of students in mathematics.
Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society. In the current movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets, and economic justice. Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions often include taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, labor law and regulation of markets, to ensure distribution of wealth, and equal opportunity.
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 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.
Student-centered learning, also known as learner-centered education, broadly encompasses methods of teaching that shift the focus of instruction from the teacher to the student. In original usage, student-centered learning aims to develop learner autonomy and independence by putting responsibility for the learning path in the hands of students by imparting to them skills, and the basis on how to learn a specific subject and schemata required to measure up to the specific performance requirement. Student-centered instruction focuses on skills and practices that enable lifelong learning and independent problem-solving. Student-centered learning theory and practice are based on the constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the learner's critical role in constructing meaning from new information and prior experience.
Pedagogy, from Ancient Greek παιδαγωγία (paidagōgía), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
A didactic method is a teaching method that follows a consistent scientific approach or educational style to present information to students. The didactic method of instruction is often contrasted with dialectics and the Socratic method; the term can also be used to refer to a specific didactic method, as for instance constructivist didactics.
Constructivism is a theory in education which posits that individuals or learners do not acquire knowledge and understanding by passively perceiving it within a direct process of knowledge transmission, rather they construct new understandings and knowledge through experience and social discourse, integrating new information with what they already know. For children, this includes knowledge gained prior to entering school. It is associated with various philosophical positions, particularly in epistemology as well as ontology, politics, and ethics. The origin of the theory is also linked to Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Herbert Ralph Kohl is an educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education and as the author of more than thirty books on education. He founded the 1960s Open School movement and is credited with coining the term "open classroom".
P.K. Srinivasan (PKS) was a well known mathematics teacher in India. He taught mathematics at the Muthialpet High School in Chennai, India until his retirement. His singular dedication to education of mathematics would bring him to the United States, where he worked for a year, and then to Nigeria, where he would work for six years. He is known in India for his dedication to teaching mathematics and in creating pioneering awareness of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He has authored several books in English, Telugu and Tamil that introduce mathematics to children in novel and interesting ways. He was also a prominent reviewer of math books in the weekly Book Review column of the Indian newspaper The Hindu in Chennai.
Catholic social teaching (CST) is an area of Catholic doctrine which is concerned with human dignity and the common good in society. It addresses oppression, the role of the state, subsidiarity, social organization, social justice, wealth distribution. CST's foundations are considered to have been laid by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum, which advocated distributism. Its roots can be traced to Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. CST is also derived from the Bible and cultures of the ancient Near East.
Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence." Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another's resources and skills. Furthermore, the teacher's role changes from giving information to facilitating students' learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds. Ross and Smyth (1995) describe successful cooperative learning tasks as intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher-order thinking tasks. Cooperative learning has also been linked to increased levels of student satisfaction.
Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. PBL contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems, or scenarios.
Constructionist learning is the creation by learners of mental models to understand the world around them. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use what they already know, to acquire more knowledge. Students learn through participation in project-based learning where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through coaching rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance. Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.
The Moore method is a deductive manner of instruction used in advanced mathematics courses. It is named after Robert Lee Moore, a famous topologist who first used a stronger version of the method at the University of Pennsylvania when he began teaching there in 1911.
Debora Hammond is an American historian of science, former Provost and Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at the Sonoma State University. She is known as author of the 2003 book The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory, and as 2005–06 President of International Society for the Systems Sciences.
Multicultural education is a set of educational strategies developed to provide students with knowledge about the histories, cultures, and contributions of diverse groups. It draws on insights from multiple fields, including ethnic studies and women studies, and reinterprets content from related academic disciplines. It is a way of teaching that promotes the principles of inclusion, diversity, democracy, skill acquisition, inquiry, critical thought, multiple perspectives, and self-reflection. One study found these strategies to be effective in promoting educational achievements among immigrant students.
Taguig City University (TCU) is a Philippine local university. It was established in 2006 by the Sangguniang Bayan of the Municipal Government of Taguig. It is located in Gen. Santos Ave., Central Bicutan, Taguig City.
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.
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. Mathematics for social justice puts particular emphasis on overcoming social inequalities. Its proponents, for example, Bob Moses, may understand numerical literacy as a civil right. Many of the founders of the movement, e.g. Eric Gutstein, were initially mathematics teachers, but the movement has since expanded to include the teaching of mathematics at colleges and universities. Their educational approach is influenced by earlier critical pedagogy advocates such as Paulo Freire and others. 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.