Abolition Science: Imagining a Decolonial STEM
This interactive session is for a general audience and will ask participants to imagine ways in which they can enact an abolition science to delink STEM from its colonial underpinnings (capitalism, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness). After a brief introduction to the concepts of Abolition Science and Black Feminist Futurity, we will work individually and collectively to imagine what decolonial STEM practices could look like in our respective places of work, activism, theorizing, organizing, etc.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Graduate Students
Algebra Project’s Curricular Process: Radically Learner-Centered Design
The Algebra Project develops curricular materials with a pedagogical flavor that serves all learners. I co-presented about our 5-step curricular process in 2012, at which time participants expressed a need for more examples. The Algebra Project ‘keeps on pushin’, and eight years later I would like to answer that call.
In this session we will work through two examples of AP curriculum pieces: Height Chart and Probability Line to discuss the design elements that make them radical. In a world of standardized tests, approved vendors, and big publishers; let us not forget to co-construct meaning in our classrooms.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Professors
Beyond Darwin: Re-Envisioning the Galapagos Islands in STEM Education
In education, “Galápagos” is synonymous with “Charles Darwin.” This perspective is limiting historically, scientifically, and socially as it presents STEM as a static body of knowledge established through the efforts of a few individuals. In this session, participants will engage in a high school level cross-curricular STEM lesson centered in the local context of the Galápagos Islands. Attendees will participate in scientific research through mathematical analysis of raw data collected in 2019 from Galápagos tortoises. Discussions will center around how scientific knowledge is constructed, who participates in the construction of knowledge, who has access and why.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth
Black Unspeakable Joy as the Foundation for STEM Education: The Role of the Collective Historical Consciousness in the Re-Envisioned.
This presentation introduces the construct Black Unspeakable Joy—all things beautiful regarding Blackness that emerges as a form of celebration, recognition, and appreciation when reflecting over the past, current, and future possibilities of surviving and enduring the racialized struggle—and imagines it as the root of future STEM education. In doing so, this presentation raises critical questions regarding what elements of the collective historical consciousness of racialized groups should be retained when crafting a version of STEM education free of oppression; who gets to choose those elements; and what possible effect it could have on the collective.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Language positive statistics: Who am I? Who are we?
Understanding and communicating mathematical ideas requires precision in any language. You will gain theoretical background about the connection between learning math and learning language as a social justice concern. You will experience patterns and statistics and think together about supporting students in getting the language for deep math understanding. You will learn strategies to invite every student to bring their language(s) and ways of seeing to math class. You will get a framework for creating a language positive math learning culture and an invitation to collaborate using resources provided on-line by the facilitator.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Building Structures for Academic Conversations in STEM
In this session, participants will learn how to set up systems in their classrooms where students challenge one another in service of collaborative learning. As a collective, we will discuss what it truly means to work collaboratively, what academic conversations sound like at their best, how a group thinks critically together and how to challenge ideas, not people. We will then create a model for collaborative discussion in our STEM classrooms and evaluate its effectiveness.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Creating Equitable Participation
During this workshop you will learn how a small math department individually and collectively work towards developing math experiences within their classroom that enhance student agency and restore equitable participation. You will also get a chance to do some math and experience some of the structures used to help create such an environment!
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Critically Reimagining Liberatory Science Education
As Black STEM+ scholar-activists committed to radical transformation, we are troubled by existing perspectives surrounding equity in STEM+ education. Practices and policies geared toward equity, diversity, inclusion and justice in STEM+ education have remained stagnant in addressing the white supremacist nature of institutionalized policies and procedures that affect Black and non-white students’ participation. Engaging narratives of those who have been historically, politically, and structurally excluded from STEM+, we reimagine a Critical Race Science that upends dominant narratives of science (who participates in science, who creates sciences, whose science is most worth knowing) while creating space for social transformation in STEM+.
High School Teachers, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Decolonizing science education: Lifting language and culture
Through an agricultural engineering unit, participants will engage in hands-on science around pollination that incorporates local plants. A discussion will follow around decolonizing science education by examining the history of western “science.” While this unit focuses on grades K-2, an overview of the engineering design process and a 5E lesson plan model will be presented that encompasses K-8th education. Participants will also discuss how culture and language, specifically, can be infused in lessons to create equity for multilingual/multicultural learners. Lastly, participants will leave with resources that assist in planning units that elevate culture and language applicable to dual-language contexts.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, Parents, Community Activists, Professors
Democratizing Access to Virtual Reality Technology
In this session participants will engage in a hands-on maker math task to build their own virtual reality headset out of recycled materials. The activity will be differentiated by participant choice of paired or independent working style and scaffolded through optional pre-cut materials and design blueprints. Following the activity, participants will reflect and share their experiences using applied mathematics throughout the activity and then discuss the opportunities to address the STEAMM achievement gap through democratizing virtual reality technology. Understanding that many participants may be new to virtual reality technology, the session will open with a brief introduction to virtual reality and its possibilities within education.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Dismantling the Barrier of Tracking: Connect, Collaborate and Commit
Are you a math leader dedicated to creating and supporting equitable mathematics experiences for all students? Ready to ensure students have access to the mathematics they need for their personal and professional lives? Want to collaborate and commit to dismantling unjust systems? We’ll share research and trends related to the early stages of detracking mathematics programs. We’ll include time to connect, explore, and discuss strategies for addressing common concerns and initial resistance to this crucial systemic change and bolster your commitment to act on eliminating tracking in your sphere of influence.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Parents, Community Activists
For The People! Articulating and Enacting a Critical Numeracy
The purpose of this session is twofold: (1) to illuminate an emerging analytical framework for a critical numeracy-problematizing the teaching and learning of numbers; and (2) to use this framework to enact numeracy so that people understand numbers as a social and political activity. Drawing upon works that examine Eurocentrism and a presumed objectiveness of science grounded in coloniality and underdevelopment, numeracy must be situated, contextualized, historicized, and politicized. Numeracy can be a tool for political organizing in schools, provoking educators to engage in projects that oppose injustice by means of an expansive approach to mathematics education.
Elementary Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists
Generative Themes: Culture- and Place-based concerns and commitments
Mathematics educators committed to an education for liberation framework are poised to transform mathematics learning that holds promise for raising political consciousness of dispossessed youth, inspiring them towards collective change. The facilitators will share their experiences creating and implementing secondary-level mathematics units with twelfth graders across one school year that shifted students’ views of how mathematics could support struggles for justice in their communities. In the session, facilitators will describe and facilitate a whole-group discussion around the challenges and promises of co-constructing localized generative themes and creating/implementing curriculum based on students’ lives.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
I Belong in the Math Classroom: Strategies for Elevating Student Voice and Shared Authority
Students often feel like they do not belong in the math classroom; students may feel that the content or structure of the classroom activities are disconnected from their culture or knowledge base. This session aims to give teachers strategies including talk protocols and teacher moves that promote several elements of culturally responsive education (CRE) including shared authority and elevating student voice. Teachers will engage with the Story Huddle, Puzzle-Pair-Share and Lean-In protocols and be able to reflect and discuss how they would adapt these strategies for their particular classroom needs.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Impacts of teaching using STEMS^2 Pedagogy
In this session, four graduates of the STEMS^2 masters concentration at UH Manoa will share how they implement STEMS^2 pedagogy in their teaching and learning spaces and the impacts the application of STEMS^2 pedagogy has had on their practice and on their students. Following this share, presenters will support participants in exploring the applications of STEMS^2 pedagogy in their places.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Leading an Equity Literacy Initiative in your State: Michigan Advancing Equity in STEM (MAE-STEM)
Are you interested in building a shared space for mathematics educators to connect and collaborate to ensure student outcomes can no longer be predicted by student demographics alone?
Come learn how the Michigan Mathematics and Science Leadership Network teamed with Paul Gorski and the Equity Literacy Institute to implement a year-long capacity-building initiative for math and science education leaders, Michigan Advancing Equity in STEM (MAE-STEM). We focused on refining our abilities to Recognize, Respond to, and Redress systemic and structural inequities. Learn how our regional teams collaborated and developed structures for eliminating state-wide inequities in mathematics education.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Leveraging Design Thinking to Create Learning Experiences about Environmental Justice
In this session, participants will engage in design thinking activities in small groups in order to create opportunities for middle- and high-school students to develop their STEM skills while learning about environmental issues. Design thinking is a set of mindsets, methods, and abilities that allow us to effectively use our natural creative abilities in solving problems; in this context, it will help participants explore innovative ways to involve students in learning, caring, and acting to address climate-induced changes. Given that climate change disproportionately affects underrepresented minorities and lower income groups, it is crucial that they be empowered to explore, understand, and solve environmental problems.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists
Linguistically and Culturally Equitable Computer Science for Young Children
In this session, participants will explore early computer science (CS) concepts and ways to create linguistically inclusive learning environments. Participants will discuss social justice frames for CS (e.g. Vakil (2018)) and linguistic diversity (e.g. Valdés, Poza, & Brooks (2015)) and engage in three hands on activities. One activity will focus on linguistic diversity and give students practice counting. In the second activity, students are introduced to basic algorithms and sequences through dance. In the third activity, students practice building basic algorithms by giving instructions to the protagonist of a story told in multiple languages.
Elementary Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists
Machine Learning Bias: Using Computing and Simulation to Examine Disparate Racial Outcomes for Pre-Trial Risk Assessment Models
In the last decade, Big Data algorithms and statistical models have become more and more prevalent in public life. Unfortunately, these models and algorithms are not well understood by the public; yet they continue to play a role in accelerating the school-to-prison pipeline, redlining, and overpolicing. In this session we will be using a low-tech probability simulation (paper) along with Monte Carlo simulations to show how overpolicing can lead these models to become more and more skewed over time. (Data exploration time included)
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Math For Social Justice: Lessons From Within A Mile Range Radius
How do you go beyond the classroom walls and empower students to access quality mathematics learning? How can you get the most from your students using local and context driven data derived from within a mile range radius of a given location? Come, engage in tasks that reflect math for social justice and start developing your own lessons.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Mathematics Education through Ethnic Studies: Towards Realizing the Dream
Members of Radical STEMM of the Bay Area invite you to engage in conversations around the role of ethnic studies in and for teaching mathematics and science. While culturally responsive mathematics teaching, social justice mathematics, and to some extent sociocultural approaches, have been taken up in mathematics education, little to no research, curriculum, or practices exist that inform how mathematics classrooms might utilize ethnic studies frameworks to address long-existing patterns of marginalization of minoritized communities (ie, black, brown, indigenous, and other oppressed groups.) This panel discussion will share various perspectives and learnings on building critical STEMM pedagogy with and for our communities.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Platicas, Testimonios y Conocimiento: Rewriting the Mathematics Equation
In this workshop I hope to converge three concepts that are everyday knowledge in the comunidad Latina (feminine form of Latino community) to mathematics learning. Platicas (conversations that take place with trust) in math spaces are imperative to provide room for testimonios (testimonies) and conocimiento (connected knowledge) about who we are, about the community and about mathematics. These three concepts organically can become the gateway to reimagine in a commitment to social justice that begins during platicando mathematics and continues for the betterment of the comunidad (community).
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Problem Based Learning: A Tool for Bridging Social Justice and STEM Education
In this session participants will engage in an interactive lesson on designing a Problem Based Lesson (PBL). Presenters will provide an overview of what a PBL is and provide several samples of completed PBLs that have incorporated the student’s acquisition of science, technology, engineering, art and math into solving a real world social justice issue that affected them and/or their communities. Presenters will guide the participants through the process of designing a PBL in small groups, followed by a Q & A session.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Re-orienting the Math Space that We Claim: Reconstructing Our Personal Math Narratives
The purpose of this presentation is to seek our own math narratives as a way to model how to be vulnerable about math learning with our students. As an Asian American Muslim female who struggled with math in high school, I felt stupid because Asian American girls are supposed to be good at math. Because of this anxiety and negative self-perception around math, I veered as far away as I could from math, excelling in literature and history. I want to present my own math narrative as a model for math teachers and students to understand that learning math is as much as a sociocultural event as it is a cognitive one (Moll, 2000; Rogoff, 1990; Rogoff & Lave, 1984). We will collaboratively come up with ways to re-orient our relationship to math and reclaim our math space.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Social justice mathematics: Policing and the issue of racial profiling
This session will shine a light on policing and traffic stops with an eye to analysis that we — as students, instructors, and activists — can do for ourselves. We will consider a variety of data sources, including larger cities and smaller towns. Participants can use a wide range of mathematical entry points, from quantitative reasoning to statistical arguments. We will see that the data reveal information about a number of legal issues, such as Fourth Amendment rights. Materials and approaches can be modified by educators for use in their own classrooms.
High School Teachers, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
Teacher Coaching in Support of Social Justice STEM
This session examines STEM teacher coaching as a support for social justice education. Because it is locally-situated and can respond to community-specific needs, teacher coaching is a promising support for justice-oriented teachers. This session is designed as a collaboration to build on the collective experience and imagination of participants, to re-imagine STEM teacher coaching: we’ll examine case studies and a tentative conceptualization of coaching for social justice STEM teachers, along with practical and theoretical questions. Participants will contribute challenges, questions, and re-conceptualizations based on experience, and leave with new visions for how coaching can support teachers in enacting justice-oriented pedagogies.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
The Self-Empowering Uncertainties of Critical/Social Justice Mathematics: Perspectives from a Mathematics Teacher Educator and Classroom Teacher
A mathematics teacher educator and a mathematics classroom teacher share their perspectives and motivations behind introducing teachers and high school students, respectively, to the promises and challenges of the empowering uncertainties of teaching mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ). The session has three parts. Part I, the teacher educator shares his methods of introducing teachers to critical/social justice mathematics. Part II, the classroom teacher shares his methods of introducing high school students to critical/social justice mathematics. Part III, the teacher educator, and classroom teacher share their individual journeys into TMfSJ and speak about some of their ongoing obstacles to TMfSJ.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Professors, Graduate Students
The story of my Mama da mathematician: re-humanizing the concepts of who is a math scholar & genius
Historically, we celebrate mathematicians who ARE white cisgendered AND male. However, there are MATHEMATICIANS in ALL of our communities. We will showcase real world stories of people who are math genius in everyday life. Single parents who support their families, grandmas that stretch meals and families that save to send their kiddos to college. Through this lens we will look at the social unjustice of being called a mathematician.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students
The WSU Math Corps: Empowering Children through Mentoring and Mathematics
The WSU Math Corps Summer Camp was founded in 1992 to offer quality educational opportunities for students in Detroit; but it has grown into something more powerful—a supportive community that values and practices courage, kindness, and critical thinking. Empowered by their deepening understanding of mathematics, members come to see the importance of hard work and a supportive community in realizing their own unique greatness. This session will introduce some of the philosophies and practices that undergird the components of the camp and that have created an ever-growing “Math Corps Family” who now seeks to create a more just world.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students
Thinking Critically Through Mathematical Discovery
We all want students to understand that mathematics goes beyond adding up a bunch of numbers. Our primary objective is to get students to think critically about math. This workshop will look at the activities involving for 8th grade students in a summer math camp. A course called “Discovery” allows students to learn about: Fibonacci sequence, Graph Theory, Pascal’s Triangle, Topology, Golden Rectangle and Cryptography. This session will allow participants to engage in some of the activities as well as discuss the reasoning, logic, and critical thinking involved from the students’ perspective.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Youth, Parents, Community Activists, Professors, Undergraduate Students
Using ancestral tools to solve math problems
Participants will learn about the Nahui Ollin and how it can be used as a framework for students to solve math problems. As an ancient Aztec cyclical process, concepts within the four movements of the Nahui Ollin can be used as a supporting structure for students to fully engage with word problems when applied in a graphic organizer.
Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers
What About When We Cause Harm?
Teachers hold enormous power in our classrooms. As we learn and grow, many of us follow the words of Maya Angelou: “When you know better, do better.” Once we come to know better, we recognize harm we’ve caused in the past. The work of rehumanizing mathematics must include reckoning with that harm. In this facilitated conversation, we will recognize our own humanity in our mistakes and our feelings around them, as well as consider ways to make it right with students and with ourselves.
Elementary Teachers, Middle School Teachers, High School Teachers, Professors, Graduate Students