Teaching Logic for Social Justice: How Students’ Reasoning About Axioms and Definitions Can Support Their Reasoning Around Prisons and Abolition (Poster 11)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 11:45am
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

Mathematics education is implicated in and can reinforce societal inequities via harmful disciplinary practices, such as decontextualizing data or treating one's conclusions as objective. While some scholarship in the K-12 context describes possibilities for using math to understand and resist social injustices, this work predominantly utilizes statistics and computation, leaving proof unexplored despite its significant role throughout K-16 mathematics. I propose that proof instruction can be modified in service of teaching math for social justice while subverting harmful disciplinary practices. In this design-based research study, I explore how undergraduate math students can use skills from logic to discuss prisons and abolition. I develop a local instructional theory that accounts for cross-disciplinary parallels in students’ reasoning about assumptions and definitions.

Author

• Megumi Asada, Rutgers University