Mathematics and Fair Voting
Ken Collins
Voting issues have become a hot topic. What are some techniques that are used to “unfairly” affect the outcome? In a multicandidate race, how can we use mathematics to help election outcomes reflect the “will of the people”?
Payday Loans and Predatory Lending: investigating using technology in an Algebra 2 classroom.
Joel Walsh
The USC Hybrid High School follows a 1:1 chromebook to student model where Google docs, the Canvas learning management system, and blended learning are prevalent. During a unit on logarithms and exponential equations students were tasked with investigating the business practices of payday loans providers in their own neighborhoods. What followed was an eye opening look at an under-regulated industry that relies on exploiting low-income and minority communities to survive. (Laptops highly recommended)
Getting the Most Out of a Test
Katie Waddle and Nick Chan
We found that tests weren’t showing us what all students had learned, but we weren’t ready to completely abandon a traditional assessment structure. We will describe the progress we’ve made in developing tests that actually show us what students know. These small changes have really made a difference for our teaching, and for our students. We teach in EL classrooms, but this workshop will be applicable to any context.
Early Childhood Mathematics and Social Justice: Developing an Asset-Based Discourse about our Youngest Mathematicians
Mary Candace Raygoza, Brandon McMillan, Nicholas Johnson, Megan Franke, Angela Chan Turrou
Current discourse in early childhood mathematics positions students, particularly low-income Students of Color, as knowing little. This session will focus on our work with early childhood teachers and students across a major metropolitan area. Drawing on teacher professional development, classroom observations, and student assessments, we will give examples of how more mathematically challenging, open-ended tasks enable teachers and students to show what they know. Session participants will engage in dialogue on collectively advancing an asset-based discourse about our youngest mathematicians.
Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice and the Political Ideologies of Mathematics Teachers
Mary Candace Raygoza
This session describes the results of two studies. The first study investigates teaching mathematics for social justice. Interviews with fifteen diverse high school teachers from urban cities across the U.S. were conducted to uncover social justice mathematics teachers’ commitments, challenges, and what they envision for the future of urban mathematics education. The second study draws on a national teacher survey to report on the political ideologies of U.S. mathematics teachers. Session participants will discuss how we may expand social justice mathematics, considering different city, district, and school contexts and what we know about mathematics teachers’ ideologies.
That’s Not Fair and Why: Activist Mathematical Activities for Children
Theodore Chao, DeAndrea Jones, Maya Marlowe, Marguerethe Jaede
Mathematics is an overlooked and powerful tool for children to document and understand injustice in their world. In this session, we introduce a series of games based on historic (Rosa Parks) and current events (Ferguson) for Pre-K and Elementary-aged children to a) understand how to recognize unfairness, b) use mathematics to talk about why things are unfair, and c) use technology (mobile phones and tablets) to recognize, document, and speak about the unfairness they see.
Project Based Learning: Education Remix
Vanson Nguyen
Participants will learn about and engage with innovative projects employed at various levels of mathematics. Descriptions of projects and student work will be presented including hip-hop lyrical analysis, creative teaching, and data regression for improvement. Following, participants will be able to think tank other innovative project ideas.
Critical Education in Science, Mathematics and Technology: An advanced mathematical application of urban gentrification and indices of dissimilarity
Nathan Alexander, Sepehr Vakil, Sumer Seiki, and Rick Ayers
In this session, we will address and critique inequities within and outside of mathematics education using social and geo-spatial frameworks. Participants will be prompted to discuss shifts related to and prompted by reform-oriented narratives, as well as problematizing implications related to gentrification, schooling and mathematics education. Participants will engage in work being developed in a set of new Initiatives in the Center for Critical Education in Science, Mathematics and Technology (CESMT) at USF, and describe the collective’s short- and long-term goals. Specifically, this workshop will include hands on work focusing on an advanced mathematical application of gentrification and urbanization, which will include discussions related to the practical integration of critical education topics in K-12 mathematics. One overarching goal for this workshop is to allow attendees to imagine possible futures and generate new possibilities for K-12 mathematics, science and technology using critical frameworks.
Interdisciplinary Unit: Using Statistics to Examine Human Rights and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
Katie Gates and Sunshine Campbell
In this session, participants will experience some of the instructional strategies and math tasks that one of the presenters has used with her 9th grade Algebra students during their human rights statistics unit. This interdisciplinary unit was co-created by humanities and math teachers, and includes topics such as bullying, suspension, incarceration, police brutality, race, and gender. In addition to learning about this specific example of a social justice math unit, participants will also have an opportunity to engage in the process of planning a social justice themed unit or lesson, and gain experience searching for data. Resources and planning tools will be provided.
Who gets pulled over?: Mathematics as a tool for exploring the (dis)proportionality of police traffic stop data
Jessica Burbach
This workshop will engage participants in a Culturally Responsive Mathematics (CRM) curriculum unit with a social justice focus. Through interacting with the CRM lessons in the “Who gets pulled over?” unit, participants will see how mathematics can be used as a lens for exploring social justice issues in our communities. We will also discuss how we can create spaces of empowerment in our classrooms where students can take action against injustices in their communities. My hope is that participants will leave with the confidence to implement a CRM lesson using the materials provided or by creating their own lesson.
Next Steps for the Middle Grades: Building on Opportunities from Foundation Concepts of Early Childhood Social Justice Education
Diana Erchick and Martha Melgoza
Following a brief introduction of four concepts we propose as foundational to early childhood pedagogy (Context, Caring, Commitment, and Content), participants in this session will discuss these foundations and how they relate to and can be directly capitalized upon in intermediate and middle grades social justice mathematics classrooms. Participants and facilitators together also will discuss specific pedagogies and curriculum that support the development of these foundational concepts into the intermediate and middle grades. Goals include discovery of opportunities to build upon early childhood foundations, generating ideas about more strategies, and creating opportunities to collaborate over time.
See them taught, see them solved: Social justice mathematics lessons taught by preservice teachers and solved by elementary students
Joan Kwako and Jim Clayton
Participants will view videos of preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) teaching, and elementary students solving, math lessons using social justice (SJ) contexts such as budgeting for groceries and racial profiling. The PSTs had been introduced to using SJ contexts to teach mathematics and will share the teaching of their own SJ mathematics lessons via videos. Elementary students will then share their solution strategies to those lessons as they work in groups to solve the problems, again, via videos. Additional SJ lessons written by PSTs from both a homogeneous, public Midwest university and a diverse, private East Coast university will be available for critique.
Developing mathematics teachers for social justice
Jessica Alyce Wilson, Karina K. R. Hensberry
This session focuses on the experiences of mathematics teacher educators and their work in preparing teachers to teach math for social justice. From a panel of experienced teacher educators ranging from junior to full professors, participants will gain insight into how these teacher educators came to be involved with social justice work, how they engage preservice and inservice teachers, and what challenges they’ve faced — and how they’ve overcome those challenges. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in a discussion with the panel.
Restorative Justice, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, & Hip Hop Chess
Arash Daneshzadeh, Adisa Banjoko
We will introduce participants to the theoretical frameworks and historical precedents that cause the school-to-prison pipeline epidemic. Using both academic research and an infusion of hip hop/chess/jiu jitsu pedagogy that undergird the curriculum and programs at HHCF, participants will explore how culturally relevant pedagogy can help dismantle this burgeoning crisis in schools that disproportionately impact low-income students and students of color. Participants will receive demonstrations of lesson plans, see videos of case studies in which curriculum has served incarcerated youth, and develop their own leadership strategies to create more holistic and culturally responsive educational spaces for under-served students and their communities.
Project and Problem Based Learning in the Math Classroom
Dina Mahmood
Participants will be guided through the process of planning a project or series of problems that will engage students in learning mathematics as it applies to the real world. Templates, samples, will be provided as participants are expected to share out their project idea for critical friends at the end of the session.
Critical Mathematics Education: The Issue of Apportionment
Leah Frazee, Stephen Lewis, Azin Sanjari
In this session we will address the issue of Congressional Apportionment through a Critical Mathematics (CM) instructional perspective. We present a new model in which CM instruction critiques the seemingly bias-free mathematical processes that create issues of inequity when applied to real-world issues. The mathematical processes historically used in apportioning representatives empower or devalue individuals regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or religion, thus making it an issue of global inequity. We present a critique of an existing apportionment unit and make recommendations to enhance the unit in both mathematical content and in critical examination of issues of inequity.
Teaching Math for Social Justice: Getting Started and Keeping Going
Rico Gutstein
This workshop is for teachers/pre-service teachers/teacher educators with a range of experiences in teaching math for social justice, or supporting others to do so—from “beginners” to “experienced” practitioners, and everyone in between. We will discuss some of the organizing theory and principles in doing this work, draw on concrete examples from practice, and discuss specific ways of starting and continuing this work. The framing is that we all need to “reinvent” in our own situations what others have done in theirs, to support students in learning to read and write the world with mathematics.
Parent leaders in math for social justice
Carolee Koehn Hurtado
(abstract forthcoming)