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Using mathematics as a tool to interrogate (in)justice and take action toward a more socially just world in PreK–12 mathematics shows promise for disrupting marginalization of Black and Brown stude...

This task structure both engages students in serious, grade-level appropriate mathematical work and allows the teacher to do the intentional and purposeful work of building a collaborative classroom culture. We highlight possibilities for adapting this task structure to teach different mathematics content across grade levels 3–5.

Mathematics classrooms are increasingly becoming sites for investigating social (in)justice, but research on teaching mathematics for social justice remains limited to individual case studies. This article reports on a metasynthesis of 35 qualitative reports of social justice mathematics enactments in diverse classroom contexts. Critical race theory serves as a guiding framework for analyzing possibilities and limitations of these enactments to address racial inequities in mathematics education. Findings from this metasynthesis reveal that addressing race in social justice mathematics explorations provided opportunities for centering the voices of people of Color and critiquing liberal views that camouflage subtle forms of racism and involved substantial and authentic mathematical work. Promising practices and implications for future research are identified based on this synthesis.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools abruptly transitioned to emergency remote instruction. Consequently, expectations for parental involvement in school mathematics rose to unprecedented levels. We sought to understand the experiences of parents to reimagine possibilities for engagement in mathematics during and beyond the pandemic. Leveraging data from tweets using #mathathome and survey responses from parents, we identified who supported continued mathematics learning at home and explored the nature of the mathematics taught there. We found that Twitter and survey data sources described two largely distinct groups of those supporting parents to continue mathematics education at home, but similar findings emerged from analyses of each data source, suggesting that themes were common among different groups. Namely, we saw a commitment to continued mathematics learning and engagement with a range of mathematics topics. These topics mostly focused on elementary-level content, especially counting, through everyday activities/objects and mathematical sense-making. Most parents used resources provided by the school alongside resources they identified and provided on their own. School responses to emergency remote instruction were mostly asynchronous, and parents expressed a need for more opportunities to interact directly with their children’s teachers. We discuss what the mathematics education community might learn from these experiences to support parental engagement during and beyond periods of remote emergency instruction.

This department publishes brief news articles, announcements, and guest editorials on current mathematics education issues that stimulate the interest of TCM readers and cause them to think about an issue or consider a specific viewpoint about some aspect of mathematics education.

We consider how prospective elementary teachers think about multiple mathematical knowledge bases as they consider adapting existing mathematics curriculum materials to meet the needs of culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse students. Multiple mathematical knowledge bases include both children’s mathematical thinking and the cultural-, home-, and community-based funds of knowledge that children inevitably bring into the classroom. We explored how prospective elementary teachers attended to multiple mathematical knowledge bases as they used a lesson analysis tool, the Curriculum Spaces Table, to evaluate existing curriculum materials and identify spaces for adapting these curriculum materials to more efficiently meet the needs of all students. Our analysis examined 47 written reflections on the analysis of and adaptations for a Grade 3 lesson. Findings showed that prospective teachers paid considerable attention to children’s mathematical thinking and gave some attention to funds of knowledge, but they considered these knowledge bases largely in isolation of each other. Attention to integrating children’s mathematical thinking with funds of knowledge was rare. Nonetheless, prospective teachers overwhelmingly found the Curriculum Spaces Table useful for analyzing an existing lesson and identifying spaces for adaptations to more effectively build on children’s mathematical knowledge bases. Thus, we argue that a lesson analysis tool that draws attention to multiple mathematical knowledge bases offers a promising start for prospective elementary teachers’ development of pedagogical practices that integrate children’s mathematical thinking with diverse cultural-, home-, and community-based funds of knowledge.

The quality of mathematics problems has been a concern to mathematics educators. There are many frameworks to support teachers’ posing problems to students, however, these frameworks have tended to focus primarily on their cognitive demand (e.g., Smith & Stein, 1998 ). Rarely are mathematics problems considered in relation to their social and participation dimensions, namely whether or not they are designed to support students’ collaborative problem solving ( Featherstone et al., 2011 ; Horn, 2012 ; Lotan, 2003 ). In this article the authors explore secondary prospective teachers’ (PTs) analysis and adaptations of mathematics problems after they are introduced to frameworks that foreground collaboration and equity in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Implications are offered to future teachers of mathematics and mathematics education researchers.