Mathematics in Service to the Community


Book Description

Publisher description: This book looks at the wide variety of ways in which math, statistics, and math education teachers have incorporated service-learning into their courses. These projects are not just stand-alone community service initiatives, but rather they specifically target the improvement of mathematics skills and insights of the college students in the courses with which they are associated. In some cases, the projects are the major focus of the courses. In others, they may range from an essential component to one of several options. The book also speculates about heretofore untapped possibilities for service-learning, even including courses in pure mathematics. College faculty often may not fully appreciate the wide range of support mechanisms for such ventures even within their own institutions, so the book includes a lengthy chapter on the details of converting a rough idea to a solid action plan, sometimes even picking up financial support and other often unexpected benefits along the way. Creative teachers rarely implement a project in exactly the same way as a colleague might have, so the emphasis here is to display a wide range of successful projects in order to encourage readers to develop some of their own.




High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice


Book Description

Empower students to be the change—join the teaching mathematics for social justice movement! We live in an era in which students have —through various media and their lived experiences— a more visceral experience of social, economic, and environmental injustices. However, when people think of social justice, mathematics is rarely the first thing that comes to mind. Through model lessons developed by over 30 diverse contributors, this book brings seemingly abstract high school mathematics content to life by connecting it to the issues students see and want to change in the world. Along with expert guidance from the lead authors, the lessons in this book explain how to teach mathematics for self- and community-empowerment. It walks teachers step-by-step through the process of using mathematics—across all high school content domains—as a tool to explore, understand, and respond to issues of social injustice including: environmental injustice; wealth inequality; food insecurity; and gender, LGBTQ, and racial discrimination. This book features: Content cross-referenced by mathematical concept and social issues Downloadable instructional materials for student use User-friendly and logical interior design for daily use Guidance for designing and implementing social justice lessons driven by your own students’ unique passions and challenges Timelier than ever, teaching mathematics through the lens of social justice will connect content to students’ daily lives, fortify their mathematical understanding, and expose them to issues that will make them responsive citizens and leaders in the future.




Mathematics for Social Justice: Resources for the College Classroom


Book Description

Mathematics for Social Justice offers a collection of resources for mathematics faculty interested in incorporating questions of social justice into their classrooms. The book begins with a series of essays from instructors experienced in integrating social justice themes into their pedagogy; these essays contain political and pedagogical motivations as well as nuts-and-bolts teaching advice. The heart of the book is a collection of fourteen classroom-tested modules featuring ready-to-use activities and investigations for the college mathematics classroom. The mathematical tools and techniques used are relevant to a wide variety of courses including college algebra, math for the liberal arts, calculus, differential equations, discrete mathematics, geometry, financial mathematics, and combinatorics. The social justice themes include human trafficking, income inequality, environmental justice, gerrymandering, voting methods, and access to education. The volume editors are leaders of the national movement to include social justice material into mathematics teaching. Gizem Karaali is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. She is one of the founding editors of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and an associate editor for The Mathematical Intelligencer and Numeracy ; she also serves on the editorial board of the MAA's Carus Mathematical Monographs. Lily Khadjavi is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Loyola Marymount University and is a past co-chair of the Infinite Possibilities Conference. She has served on the boards of Building Diversity in Science, the Barbara Jordan-Bayard Rustin Coalition, and the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus.




Productive Math Struggle


Book Description

All students face struggle, and they should—it is how they learn and grow. The teacher’s job is not to remove struggle, but rather to value and harness it, helping students develop good habits of productive struggle. But what’s missing for many educators is an action plan for how to achieve this, especially when it comes to math. This book guides teachers through six specific actions—including valuing, fostering, building, planning, supporting, and reflecting on struggle—to create a game plan for overcoming obstacles by sharing · Actionable steps, activities, and tools for implementation · Instructional tasks representative of each grade level · Real-world examples showcasing classroom photos and student work




Activating Math Talk


Book Description

Achieve High-Quality Mathematics Discourse With Purposeful Talk Techniques Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum. Framed around 11 student-centered discourse techniques, this research-based book connects purposeful instructional techniques to specific lesson goals and includes a focus on supporting emergent multilingual learners. You will be guided through each technique with Classroom examples of tasks and techniques spanning grades K–5 Reflection moments to help you consider how key ideas relate to your own instruction Classroom vignettes that illustrate the techniques in action and provide opportunities to analyze and prepare for your own implementation Group discussion questions for engaging with colleagues in your professional community Achieving high-quality mathematics discourse is within your reach using the clear-cut techniques that activates your math talk efforts to promote every student’s conceptual learning.




Strengths-Based Teaching and Learning in Mathematics


Book Description

"This book is a game changer! Strengths-Based Teaching and Learning in Mathematics: 5 Teaching Turnarounds for Grades K- 6 goes beyond simply providing information by sharing a pathway for changing practice. . . Focusing on our students’ strengths should be routine and can be lost in the day-to-day teaching demands. A teacher using these approaches can change the trajectory of students’ lives forever. All teachers need this resource! Connie S. Schrock Emporia State University National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics President, 2017-2019 NEW COVID RESOURCES ADDED: A Parent’s Toolkit to Strengths-Based Learning in Math is now available on the book’s companion website to support families engaged in math learning at home. This toolkit provides a variety of home-based activities and games for families to engage in together. Your game plan for unlocking mathematics by focusing on students’ strengths. We often evaluate student thinking and their work from a deficit point of view, particularly in mathematics, where many teachers have been taught that their role is to diagnose and eradicate students’ misconceptions. But what if instead of focusing on what students don’t know or haven’t mastered, we identify their mathematical strengths and build next instructional steps on students’ points of power? Beth McCord Kobett and Karen S. Karp answer this question and others by highlighting five key teaching turnarounds for improving students’ mathematics learning: identify teaching strengths, discover and leverage students’ strengths, design instruction from a strengths-based perspective, help students identify their points of power, and promote strengths in the school community and at home. Each chapter provides opportunities to stop and consider current practice, reflect, and transfer practice while also sharing · Downloadable resources, activities, and tools · Examples of student work within Grades K–6 · Real teachers’ notes and reflections for discussion It’s time to turn around our approach to mathematics instruction, end deficit thinking, and nurture each student’s mathematical strengths by emphasizing what makes them each unique and powerful.




Rethinking Mathematics


Book Description

In this unique collection, more than 30 articles show how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum, as well as how to integrate mathematics into other curricular areas. Rethinking Mathematics offers teaching ideas, lesson plans, and reflections by practitioners and mathematics educators. This is real-world math-math that helps students analyze problems as they gain essential academic skills. This book offers hope and guidance for teachers to enliven and strengthen their math teaching. It will deepen students' understanding of society and help prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy. Blending theory and practice, this is the only resource of its kind.




Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods


Book Description

Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods is the product of collaborations among over 40 mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) who teach mathematics methods courses for prospective PreK?12 teachers in many different institutional contexts and structures. Each chapter unpacks ways in which MTEs use theoretical perspectives to inform their construction of goals, activities designed to address those goals, facilitation of activities, and ways in which MTEs make sense of experiences prospective teachers have as a result. The book is organized in seven sections that highlight how the theoretical perspective of the instructor impacts scholarly inquiry and practice. The final section provides insight as we look backward to reflect, and forward with excitement, moving with the strength of the variation we found in our stories and the feeling of solidarity that results in our understandings of purposes for and insight into teaching mathematics methods. This book can serve as a resource for MTEs as they discuss and construct scholarly practices and as they undertake scholarly inquiry as a means to systematically examine their practice.




Mathematics for Human Flourishing


Book Description

Winner of the Mathematics Association of America's 2021 Euler Book Prize, this is an inclusive vision of mathematics—its beauty, its humanity, and its power to build virtues that help us all flourish“This is perhaps the most important mathematics book of our time. Francis Su shows mathematics is an experience of the mind and, most important, of the heart.”—James Tanton, Global Math Project"A good book is an entertaining read. A great book holds up a mirror that allows us to more clearly see ourselves and the world we live in. Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing is both a good book and a great book."—MAA Reviews For mathematician Francis Su, a society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without experiencing some of humanity’s most beautiful ideas.In this profound book, written for a wide audience but especially for those disenchanted by their past experiences, an award‑winning mathematician and educator weaves parables, puzzles, and personal reflections to show how mathematics meets basic human desires—such as for play, beauty, freedom, justice, and love—and cultivates virtues essential for human flourishing. These desires and virtues, and the stories told here, reveal how mathematics is intimately tied to being human. Some lessons emerge from those who have struggled, including philosopher Simone Weil, whose own mathematical contributions were overshadowed by her brother’s, and Christopher Jackson, who discovered mathematics as an inmate in a federal prison. Christopher’s letters to the author appear throughout the book and show how this intellectual pursuit can—and must—be open to all.




Mathematics Success and Failure Among African-American Youth


Book Description

Brings together theory & methods from cultural & cog. perspectives to examine forces contributing to why a dispropriate no. of African-Amer. students don't reach their potential in math & are then underrepresented in professions requiring math skills.