SOME THOUGHTS ON MATH AND A CULTURALLY RELEVANT – SUSTAINING EDUCATION
In case you missed the news, the NYC Department of Education adopted a definition of culturally responsive / sustaining education inspired by several parts scholarship, stakeholder voice, and surveys done across the city. The writers included a coalition of parents, students, educators, and other concerned citizens, including yours truly. While the media concentrated on the virulent response to the definition, which was really another anti-Richard Carranza protest, the proponents for the definition saw it as a pivotal moment in the direction of our children’s education.
Up to this point, the definition hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves in pulling us towards a more inclusive foundation for our children.
I’ll attempt to make an argument for its proliferation through the lens of math, perhaps the most hotly contested subject area with respect to our academic core. Unlike the humanities, people love treating math as a set of absolutes, a content area apart from the human experiences we inject into the rest of our scholarship. Even though more people are starting to see how their mathematical experiences are connected to the subject area itself, we still have a way to go.
When we say “Amy can’t read,” we don’t dismiss this claim from just an academic viewpoint, but also from a moral one. Illiteracy has been treated as a scourge we ought to ostensibly destroy, even when our structures perpetuate illiteracy in our most marginalized spaces. Innumeracy rarely gets this treatment, partly because of its complexity, but also because of the narratives we tell ourselves about CONTINUE READING: Some Thoughts on Math and A Culturally Relevant - Sustaining Education | The Jose Vilson