Socio-Politics of Numeracy

The Socio-Politics of Numeracy: What 6th Graders in the Bronx Wonder About

By Anjali Deshpande and McKenna Shaw

In February, 2018, McKenna’s school participated in New York’s Black Lives Matter Week of Action In Schools. This middle school is located in the north Bronx and serves a diverse student population, with the large majority of students qualifying for free and reduced price lunch. Many students’ families are living in poverty. The school’s administrative team ascribes to progressive ideals about community, service, and citizenship. The teachers work very long hours, often working weekends and nights. Similarly to other Bronx middle schools I’ve worked in, the students are almost all Black and Brown, and the school is subject to a revolving door of reforms that are implemented and sometimes abandoned in place of new policies. While it is a safe and welcoming environment, the school continues to look for ways to support students with diverse learning needs.

To start to the week of action, McKenna and I revisited the Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles and reflected on how the principles spoke to the reasons we became educators. I helped McKenna find a way to open the unit of study by asking her 6th graders: “What connections do you see between Black Lives Matter and our work in Math and Science?” This question was met with silence, blank stares, and one or two cocked heads and raised eyebrows. Then we asked students to write. We received numerous reflection papers where the sentence starter, “A connection between math and science and Black Lives Matter I see is . . . “ went unfinished. Several question marks, a few doodles. We received a limited number of substantial responses, one student wrote, “All of us in the classroom, we are a family,” and another wrote, “ one of the principles was called a ‘village’ meaning people coming together to make a family larger than your own.” Some students shared that they felt safe to make mistakes in math and science, and have their questions answered. Students saw McKenna as a teacher who “had their back” and would advocate for them socially and academically.

We learned two things. On the one hand, McKenna had created a safe classroom environment where students could engage respectfully and appreciatively of the diverse identities in the room. Students recognized and named the enactment of many of the Black Lives Matter principles in the classroom. It was rewarding to hear from sixth graders that they feel safe to learn especially when some students are coming to school to escape potentially difficult conditions at home. But it was evident that the students did not yet see math and science as real tools that can be used to measure, discuss, and affect social and political change. “Math politics? Is that a thing?” one student asked.

Mathematical literacy, or numeracy, must be primary goal for our students, it is a requirement for justice and citizenship. PISA (2013) defined the mathematically literate person as “one who understands the role mathematics plays in the world, makes well-founded judgements and uses mathematics to meet their needs as a constructive, concerned, and reflective member of society.” In Horace’s Compromise, Ted Sizer (1984) claims “Numeracy means the ability both to use numbers, arithmetically and algebraically, and to understand the concepts, relationships, and logic embedded in mathematical thought. A modern citizen cannot make critical judgments without these skills.” The math curriculum at the school asks students to reason mathematically with real-life contexts, and while using unit rates at the grocery store to identify a better buy is important and necessary, the curriculum is not designed to push students to become mathematically literate and empowered to make critical judgments about their worlds. Calculation is not enough.

In retrospect, McKenna and I are thinking of ways to shape next year’s statistics unit around current events. What better place to help students see the real and powerful applications that math has in the socio-political world? McKenna decided to pilot a new routine this year. She introduced the graph “Gun Deaths in Florida” and created a space for students to ask questions, think critically, and make connections. Take a moment toanalyze this graph; notice the y-axis (vertical axis) is inverted and the values decrease from bottom to top. Did you think gun deaths went down prior to “Stand Your Ground” law? At first, so did we. After having a chance to unpack features of the graph, one student asked, “Wait – wasn’t Trayvon Martin killed in Florida? What year was he murdered?” Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, and it was powerful to hear a sixth grader ask this question because this student was making an important connection. A great math lesson about interpreting graphs will help students make sense of data, but an empowering lesson about graphs will motivate a student to research, question, analyze, and critique the way things work in the world.

McKenna is now reflecting on the power to build numeracy into her daily teaching and learning practice. Rather than saving rich content for the very last unit of the school year, where statistics usually lives in the sixth grade curriculum, she plans to make “Math in the News” discussions happen once a week. Even if these discussions last for 5-10 minutes, the hope is to establish the norm of discussing politics, social justice and awareness, and news in math class. The hope is to help students ask the most important questions about their worlds. Students today find themselves in politically charged spaces, take the #Enough movement and gun control walkouts for example, and it is our job to give them the tools, critical and analytical skills, and the language they need to affect change. Instead of teaching math as a “school” subject and hoping students will make connections outside of the classroom, we must make space for those connections to happen during the school day.