Mathematics In the City

When I came MSU last semester, I became well acquainted with an adjunct at the school of mathematical sciences — one Eliza Leszczynski. The course I took with Eliza was College Geometry — a high school math course masquerading as a math methods course. While the class presented an enlightening departure from my dreary Ed Psych course and its pompous instructor, or my nebulous curriculum course which dabbled in mysticism and how I might reach my students with meditation, it wasn’t until I went to meet with Eliza personally that I discovered the real gems of taking a course with her. You see, while in class she presented us with math proofs on triangular numbers, beguiled us with circle inversion, and tickled us with fractals, outside of the classroom she introduced me to two math ideas I wasn’t likely to encounter in a pure maths class: Ethnomathematics and Social Justice Math.

Ethnomathematics is study of both mathematics and culture, or more importantly it’s the way that mathematics and culture interact and the study of this interaction. If you want to read about ethnomathematics’ origins and such, wikipedia has an informative article on the subject. In essence, it is one way to make math relevant to students by bridging what is usually a cold, unsympathetic subject with an aspect of students’ lives. It makes math relevant and a necessary part of one’s being.

Social Justice Math, on the other hand, is a school of mathematics instruction that argues that you can use math to understand and learn about issues of politics, economics and social justice. Contrarily, it also argues that you can use an understanding of these issues to attain stronger math literacy — in effect, to learn math. While critics argue that this form of instruction proselytizes the youth with strong biases from the left, social justice math provides students with the opportunity to judge the fairness and necessity of decisions made by our society based on statistics and mathematics facts. For a more detailed understanding of social justice math, visit radicalmath.org. Similar to ethnomathematics, social justice math also makes math relevant, but in a different way. Here, math becomes a tool for enabling students to understand the world in which they live, and the basis for the decisions that our culture makes.

When I first heard of both maths, I was scoffed at their use. In terms of urban education, however, I suspect that of the two, Social Justice Math might be more useful. Therefore, for my CI project, I would like to discover how Social Justice Math can be used in urban education. To this end, I feel that it would be terrific to have developed a website that could serve as a tool to using Social Justice Math in urban settings as well as garnering a better understanding of this school of thought and its uses.