Title: What This Work Really Takes: Lessons, Tensions, and Student Perspectives in a Social Justice Math Classroom
Abstract:
In recent years, there have been growing calls for mathematics instruction that engages students in understanding and critiquing injustice through mathematics. While resources for social justice math lessons have become increasingly available, implementing these lessons in real classrooms—with real students, real time constraints, and real pressures—remains a challenge. This dissertation explores how teachers and students navigate this complexity through three connected papers.
The first paper introduces a framework to support teachers and mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) in selecting and modifying pre-designed social justice math lessons (PSJMLs). The framework is organized around three guiding principles: (1) knowing students’ interests and lived experiences, (2) attending to mathematical goals, and (3) selecting and modifying lessons in ways that maintain the integrity of both the context and the content. After using the framework to select and modify a PSJML in a college capstone course, we found that students engaged in ways we hoped to elicit—reasoning through mathematical models, questioning data and assumptions, and connecting the mathematics to their own lived and historical knowledge. While not tested in a K-12 setting, this framework offers a practical tool for helping teachers bridge the gap between existing social justice resources and the realities of their own classrooms.
The second paper examines the tensions that emerged when a high school teacher (Mr. L) and I co-created and co-taught a course specifically designed around social justice math lessons. Despite ideal conditions—a dedicated course, administrative support, and a collaborative teaching team—tensions arose around balancing content (specifically proportional reasoning) and context, aligning lesson goals with students’ lived experiences, and pushing against dominant ideas of what counts as mathematics. These findings speak to the real challenges teachers face, even when they are fully committed to this work.
The third paper shifts focus to students’ perspectives. Drawing on five anonymous surveys, this study explores how students defined community, whether they felt the class was a community, and how community-building activities shaped those feelings. Students emphasized themes like group, shared experiences, and interaction, while also naming belonging and atmosphere as key to feeling comfortable in the classroom. Importantly, the percentage of students who viewed the class as a community rose from 39% at the start of the semester to 75% by the end, with many citing the community-building activities as a reason.
Together, these three papers offer insight into how SJM lessons can be selected, modified, implemented, and supported in practice, and how community-building can play a critical role in helping students feel safe enough to engage in conversations about injustice. This dissertation contributes to ongoing conversations about bridging theory and practice, supporting teacher-researcher partnerships, and creating mathematics classrooms that are not only rigorous, but centered on helping students use mathematics to understand and question injustice.