Education Week - December 2, 2020 - 14

Teaching Math Through
A Social Justice Lens
By
Catherine
Gewertz

s racial inequity soars on the
nation's radar, math teachers
are increasingly bringing social-justice questions into their
classrooms to help students
see the subject's relevance and
recognize that they can use it
to become change agents in the world.
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.
They're using math to help students understand
phenomena as varied as food deserts, disaster aid,
and college-admission test scores.
" I've definitely seen an uptick in interest " in math
lessons that infuse important social issues into
instruction, said Bootsie Battle-Holt, a math coach
who works with teachers on equity-focused math
instruction at 22 schools in the Los Angeles Unified
district. Julie Wright, a middle school math teacher in
Portland, Ore., says she's seeing a lot more activity on
the Wiki she built for teachers to share social-justice
math resources.
A new book that provides 22 high school lessons
based on social injustice, and outlines the theory and
pedagogy to support them, has become a bestseller
for Corwin, which published it with the National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
When the book, High School Mathematics Lessons to
Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice,
made the rounds on social media, the editors got so
many requests from K-8 teachers that they're now
at work on three additional volumes aimed at those
grade bands, said Robert Berry, who co-edited the
first book and is NCTM's immediate past president.
Many teachers prefer to think of math as a neutral
zone, where the " universal language " of numbers
doesn't include highly charged events of the day-and prefer to keep it that way. But advocates of
social justice math argue that that approach misses
something important: the chance to help students use
math to understand and critique the world around
them, and find ways to change it.

Connecting Math to Students' Lives
" A lot of people want us to focus only on math,
and if we're going to use real-word examples,
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 2, 2020 | www.edweek.org

they need to be astronomy, or STEM, not race,
or the nitty-gritty of what our Black and brown
children face daily, " said José Luis Vilson, a former
middle school math teacher in New York City and
the executive director of EduColor, a national
nonprofit that works on equity issues in education.
" But my kids deserve to have a connection to the
things we're talking about. "
Teachers who discuss the approach on social
media have at times come under verbal attack,
with streams of tweets that deride " woke math, "
and devolve into personal insults, obscenity, and
threats, especially against women and female
teachers of color. Some teachers declined to speak
on the record, fearing they, too, could become
targets.
Others said the work is too important to keep
under wraps. They consider the blend of math and
social justice issues potentially game-changing for
students, especially those most often marginalized
in math classrooms: students of color and those
from high-poverty neighborhoods.
" All students need to be able to use math
as a window to see the world, and a mirror to
see themselves and their experiences, their
communities, " said Berry. " But it's particularly
important for students of color, who often don't see
themselves in the mathematics curriculum. "
Typically, the use of civic and social issues to
teach math is being led by teachers in their own
classrooms. Occasionally, districts are supporting
the practice districtwide. The Clayton County
schools in Georgia, for instance, is building a social
justice approach to math across its grade levels.
The Seattle school district developed a framework
last year that weaves questions of power and
oppression into math instruction, along with
explorations of ethnic identity, but it hasn't been
adopted.
Most social justice math is unfolding in middle
and high schools, but some elementary teachers
are linking the topics, too. Melissa Collins, a
National Board-certified 2nd grade teacher in
Memphis, blends math, history, and language
arts into a unit about school segregation, using
significant years in that timeline-like 1957, when
nine Black students enrolled in all-white Central
High School in Little Rock, Ark.-to teach place
value.

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Education Week - December 2, 2020

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