A good resource for teachers
The book, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers is a solid resource. Examples of some of the activities in it include but aren’t limited to exercises like Historical, Cultural, and Social Implications of Mathematics, “Home Buying While Brown or Black”, Sweatshop Accounting, and Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood. Teaching mathematics in the context of social justice is both engaging and fun. Students enjoy learning in a context that is meaningful and has a connection to their personal lives. Much of math is taught in contexts that are arbitrary and has little application to students–especially students of color. This supplement is great because it provides an engaging context for which mathematical content can be taught in.
Ethnomathematics has this same potential depending on who is teaching it i.e. how it is manipulated. Social justice teaching typically “one-ups” ethnomathematics because it asks critical questions instead of passively presenting information; for instance, why do we not hear about the math from 3rd World Countries? Why is it that certain methods of mathematics are popularized and others aren’t? Who has the power to make those decisions and why? Why have the same groups repeatedly ended up at the bottom of the achievement gap year after year after year? How is it that many if not most students of color feel like math isn’t for them? How is it that girls often come to feel like higher level math is for guys? What are schools doing structurally that isn’t inviting to groups historically underrepresented in mathematics? Ethnomathematics provides a lot of math that isn’t “popularized” as math–who made that so? What can and should we as teachers do about it? How do we provide our students with the tools they need to help deconstruct these realities? Why haven’t we answered (or even explicitly talked about) any of these questions this term?
This supplement provides a start to this conversation. It supplies a platform for teachers and students to not only ask these questions, but also to answer them critically. We as teachers need to be asking these questions and finding creative ways to bring them up in classrooms so that our students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, not just in the content of mathematics, but also in their personal interactions with people and policies. This consciousness will help us reach all children which is so often purported in the literature and in grad programs throughout the country—yet this isn’t happening (the achievement gap backs me up here). There are other supplements like these but not many. Maybe you and I will be next in orchestrating a context in which to teach math that is engaging, inviting, and liberating.
