Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education

THEODORE CHAO THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

OCTM 2015

RESOURCES FOR EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

#OCTM2015 #EquityMathEd @professorteds

FOR MATH?WHY DOES EQUITY MATTER



THEODORE CHAO

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME

• Former middle-school teacher in Brooklyn, NY

• Current assistant professor at The Ohio State University

• My work involves:

• Equity/Social-Justice based mathematics tasks

• Mobile tech for teacher noticing

• Taught “urban” and Special Ed Elementary Teachers about using community and social justice to teach math

• I have 3 kids: 6, 4, and 2.

• I am very tired.

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PAIR AND SHARE (USE A PHOTO/IMAGE IF YOU HAVE ONE)

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

• Where and How do you teach mathematics?

• How do you see equity and social justice impacting your mathematics teaching and learning?

• What are your frameworks/definitions of what equity means?

• What resources would you like to share?


GUTIÉRREZ’S (2012) 4 DIMENSIONS OF EQUITY IN MATH

WHAT IS EQUITY ANYWAY?

• Access

• updated and rigorous texts, appropriate technology, high- quality teachers accessible outside of class hours

• Achievement

• large numbers of students engaged in mathematics, high scores on standardized achievement tests, students prepared for/continuing on to STEM-based fields

• Identity

• students able to use home languages, algorithms from home countries, students not required to park their identity at the door

• Power

• student voice in the classroom, students inventing their own algorithms, the use of mathematics to investigate problems meaningful to one’s own community


REFLECT FOR 5-MINUTES INDIVIDUALLY, THEN GROUP SHARE

LET’S REFLECT ON OUR MATH PRIVILEGE

• Along the four dimensions of learning, reflect on your experience as a math learner.

• What kinds of privilege and power did you have or not have as a math student?

• Access

• Achievement

• Identity

• Power


DONEC QUIS NUNC

50 years ago: Segregation in society & schools, Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

25 years ago: Public Schools attacked, “A Nation at Risk” (1980), Global competitiveness in math/science, Bob Moses’ Algebra as a Civil Right (1983)

10 years ago: The Accountability Movement, No Child Left Behind, Gutstein and Peterson’s Rethinking Mathematics (2005), First Creating Balance Social Justice Math Conference in Brooklyn, NY (2005)

Today: Attack on Teachers and Unions, Common Core State Standards, Black Lives Matter, Rochelle Gutíerrez’s Creative Insubordination (2013)


SHORT RESEARCH REVIEW FOR TEACHERS AND TEACHER EDS

NCTM RESEARCH BRIEF ON EQUITY PEDAGOGY

• A quick, 4-page review of the research on equity-based teaching practices in mathematics education

• Written to connect NCTM’s historic equity position statements to lack of equity language in Common Core State Standards

• Aimed to open up dialogue with and for teachers

• Written with Eileen Murray and Rochelle Gutiérrez

— Chao, Murray, and Gutiérrez

WE DEFINE EQUITY-BASED MATHEMATICS TEACHING TO MEAN PRACTICES THAT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE WAY(S) MATHEMATICS

EDUCATION PERPETUATES OPPRESSIVE NORMS AND THEREFORE ACTIVELY SEEKS TO ERASE THEM,

SO THAT ALL STUDENTS CAN PARTICIPATE MEANINGFULLY IN MATHEMATICS LEARNING AND CREATE THEIR OWN MATHEMATICAL KNOWLEDGE.

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OF EQUITY PEDAGOGY

OUR THREE INTER-RELATED PRACTICES

• Reflecting

• Not just reflecting on your pedagogy and your classroom norms, but also considering how you identify yourself and how others identify you

• Developing advocacy dispositions

• Noticing

• Attending to students’ identities

• Building upon students’ prior knowledge

• Engaging in Community

• Forging a mathematics community in the classroom

• Building your teaching community


TALK AMONGST EACH OTHER ABOUT THESE QUESTIONS

REFLECTING

• What kinds of dispositions do I hold towards teaching, students, mathematics, and the profession? Do I advocate for my students and for other teachers on a regular basis?

• The Multicultural Mathematics Dispositions Framework (MCMD) (White et al., 2012) ask questions along these three strands:

• 1. Openness: How open am I to the different ways various cultures think about and do mathematics differently and how culture affects mathematics teaching and learning?

• 2. Self-awareness/Self-reflectiveness: How aware am I of my personal culture, beliefs, and experiences learning mathematics? How do these affect my mathematics teaching?

• 3. Commitment to Culturally Responsive Mathemat- ics Teaching: How do I find ways to incorporate my students’ cultures into my teaching and to engage them in rigorous mathematics?



NOTICING

• Question: How do I listen to my students, particularly students who might have little voice in school? How might I integrate mathematical counter-narratives into and across my curriculum?

• Questions: How do my lessons utilize home language to support academic development for English learn- ers? How do my lessons help students connect mathematics with relevant/authentic situations in their lives? How do my lessons support students’ use of mathematics to understand, critique, and change an important equity or social justice issue in their lives?

• Notice Student Identities:

• help students understand the circumstances of their identities,

• question whose interests these created identities serve

• help students construct counter-narrative identities.



ENGAGING IN COMMUNITY

• Questions: What kinds of norms operate in my classroom? Do I create opportunities for students to contribute regularly, particularly students with different home languages and/or mathematical backgrounds?

• Questions: Am I doing enough to engage my colleagues and my students in meaningful ways, drawing on their passions and future goals? When I have achieved some success, can I still do things differently so that I can persuade even more teachers and students of the importance of equity? By what standards, or whose, do I measure the success that I achieve? (Gutiérrez, Bay-Williams, & Kanold, 2008).

• Forging a mathematics community:

• all students have a voice in the construction of mathematical knowledge

• Building your teaching community

• Being will- ing to take risks in teaching is much easier when done in a community of professionals who seek to advocate for students.


SOME RESOURCES

HOW TO STAY CONNECTED?

• Twitter

• #educolor

• Facebook

• Conferences

• Creating Balance in an Unjust World

• creatingbalanceconference.org

• NYCore

• Free Minds, Free People

• NCTM Diversity three-part book series.

• Radical Math website:

• http://www.radicalmath.org

• Rethinking Mathematics, 2nd Edition, book:

• Ron Eglash’s Culturally Situated Design Tools

• http://csdt.rpi.edu


MY WORK

RESEARCH ON CHILDREN’S MATHEMATICAL THINKING

• Historically, math for children 3-6 emphasizes Counting and Cardinality, with slight emphasis on “skip counting” and patterns (Clements & Sarama, 2007)

• Rational numbers seen as “too hard”, not introduced until 4/5th grade, and only emphasized in Middle School standards (NCTM, CCSS)

• Yet, recent evidence shows young children can work with rational numbers:

• If introduced through equal sharing problems (Empson & Levi, 2012)

• When embedded in stories and scenarios connected to prior knowledge (Lesh et al., 2013)


WITH YOUNG CHILDREN

CONNECTING TO FAIRNESS

Young children can work with Rational Numbers when connected to ideas of Fairness and Sharing

• Helps children build strong numerical and mathematical understanding

• Empowers children to “see” rational numbers as intuitive, rather than unconnected

• Focuses mathematical thinking around fairness and justice from an early age


SOME FINDINGS FROM MY WORK WITH CHILDREN

• Learning happens when we listen to teachers and children, both are wealth of anti-racist, equity-based resources and ideas:

• But they rarely have opportunities to connect these issues to mathematics

• Elementary children and teachers love engaging in these activities as they lead to mathematical experiences across curriculum

• Children as young as 3 (Pre-K) can understand and describe complex issues of injustice through role playing stories of Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mike Brown Jr.

• Using mathematics to document unfairness is empowering to children


SOME THINGS I’VE FOUND

ENGAGING CHILDREN TO CONCEPTUALIZE “FAIRNESS” MATHEMATICALLY

1. Know that children intuitively understand “fairness”. Try it with fair sharing problems to see. (Ex: I’ll take 3 brownies. You can have 1. Is that fair?)

2. Allow children opportunities to use mathematics to articulate “unfairness” in their world. Start with sharing games, but also connect to stories, current events, and scenarios. (Ex: Is it fair that the 5rd-graders always go to lunch 10 minutes early?)

3. Help children use mathematics to articulate and document this injustice when they see it. (Ex: Make a map showing the stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables in your neighborhood? What about the stores that sell alcohol or cigarettes?)


FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

THE FAIR SHARING GAME

• Scenario: Should involve a story context, often involving characters or settings that your students are familiar with.

• Objects: Use objects that can be counted easily, manipulated, and split into 1/2s, 1/4s, and 1/3s. Grapes, cookies, slices of american cheese, donuts, brownies, apples, pears, kiwis, bananas, popsicles, stickers, or modeling clay.

• Progression: Start simply, listening closely to your children’s thinking. Play some basic counting games to start. Only move to equal sharing problems when your children seem ready to show and discuss how they count.

• Not about teaching fractions. Rather, help children connect fractions and division to their intuitive understandings of fairness.

1. Your friend Carlos and you want to share two carrot sticks. How do you share the carrot sticks so that you and Carlos each get the same

amount?

2. There are 10 crackers to share for you and your 3 friends. How

many crackers does each child get so that they each have the same

amount of cracker?


A #BLACKLIVESMATTER MATH LESSON

TRAFFIC STOPS IN FERGUSON ACTIVITY

• A game examining racial profiling statistics in Ferguson (http://ago.mo.gov/VehicleStops/2013/reports/161.pdf). Each child has a toy car to drive across a bridge, an adult plays a “police officer”. One by one, children spin a 10-unit spinner.

• For “whites”, spinning a 1 (13%) means they get “stopped”. 1 of 3 “whites” hold a bag labeled “contraband”.

• For “blacks”, spinning a 1-9 (86%), means they get “stopped”. 1 out of 5 “blacks” hold “contraband”.

• Children are eliminated if they are stopped and carrying “contraband”. The game ends when every child has crossed the bridge or been eliminated. Children make a short video to document why the game is unfair.

• Children quickly learn, one group has unfair advantage over the other group. Why?

Task designed by Jessica James, Britni Boyer, Mallory Loless, Amber Gregg, and Theodore Chao


EXPLORING MATH OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

ROSA PARKS AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

• Create a “bus” with “front” and “back” rows, where one adults plays the “bus driver”. Children are randomly assigned to “white” or “black” groups, with more students in “black” group. Each student has a “coin”, to board the bus one at a time. The bus driver tells them where so sit: “white” in front, “black” in back. Children quickly fill up back seats and must stand, while front seats remain empty. Finally, one student plays Rosa Parks, sits in front of the bus. The bus stops, everyone gets off. The boycott begins:

• For young children (< 8), explore why it is not fair to have X number of empty seats in the front, yet Y children must stand in the back.

• Older children (8-12), examine the coins. How many coins did the bus lose every ride with the boycott? Every day? How much did the system lose during the whole boycott?

Task designed by DeAndrea Jones and Theodore Chao


IT HAS BEEN AN HONOR TO WORK WITH YOU TODAY

THANK YOU

• Remember, this is NOT easy work.

• If you want a copy of this presentation or have any questions, contact me at

• Email:

• [email protected]

• Twitter:

• @professorteds

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Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education

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Transcript of Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education