Centering Community in Formative Secondary Geometry and Statistics Lessons

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 4:20 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Holistic, Decolonial, and Nonroutine Approaches to Mathematics Education (Table 7)

Abstract

City Teaching Alliance (CTA) is a teacher preparation program that focuses on dismantling racial and socioeconomic barriers in urban education. As urban educators and graduate students at American University School of Education, we designed geometry and statistics lessons that humanize mathematics by leveraging community landmarks in Washington, DC. Humanizing mathematics allows students to see mathematics as alive in the world around them, and as a tool that can be used to make changes in society. This way of humanizing mathematics is done through the lens of Culturally Relevant (CR) pedagogy. This type of pedagogy asks a teacher to find the cultural connections between the subject they are teaching and the student they are teaching said subject to (Ladson-Billings, 1995).

Authors

• James Ling, American University

• Joshua Weisbard, American University

• MaryBeth Burst, American University

• Nicole Jutras, American University

• Seth Monfiston, City Teaching Alliance

• Patrick Wai, American University