Mathematical Empowerment:
Doing Mathematics For Social Justice
“Until recently, embedding mathematics pedagogy within social and political contexts was not a serious consideration in mathematics education. The act of counting was viewed as a neutral exercise, unconnected to politics or society… Only in school do we count without a social purpose of some kind. Outside of school, mathematics is used to advance or block a particular agenda” (Barry et al., 2020, p. 17).
Finally, the last stage of becoming resilient, is to find a purpose within oneself, and to be empowered to act and respond to social injustice. In math, this means doing mathematics in the context of solving complex and relevant issues in the world. Berry et al. (2020) argue that we ought to create math-learning tasks that “empowers them to identity, interpret, evaluate, and critique the mathematics embedded in social, scientific, commercial, and political systems (p.17).
Doing mathematical modeling has yielded me promising results from students. Compared to ordinary applications of mathematics, mathematical modeling offers and requires "(1) explicit attention at the beginning of the process of getting from the problem outside of mathematics to its mathematical formulation, and (2) an explicit reconciliation between the mathematics and the real-world situation at the end… the results have to be both mathematically correct and reasonable in the real-world” (NCTM, 2016, p.6). You can read one sample mathematics for social justice lesson that I have done with my students by clicking the button below.
Going out into the world and engaging with the community has also been immensely helpful in putting students into positions of knowledge and expertise. In the service teaching project below, you will learn about how my students put on their teacher-hats to teach Advanced electricity and magnetism concepts to local fifth graders.
Community Service Teaching Project
One particular learning experience that my students and I have thoroughly enjoyed was this service teaching project that we did in my Advanced Physics: Electricity and Magnetism class this past month. Rather than a traditional midterm exam, students were asked to design and deliver a physics lesson, related to concepts we learned in our class, to local fifth graders at Northfield Elementary School.
