They Don't Show Nothing I Didn't Know: Emergent Tensions Between Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Mathematics Pedagogy

Abstract

This article describes data from the Community Mapping Project, a set of statistical activities and inquiry projects within a summer seminar for high school students. In designing the Community Mapping Project, we attempted to create conditions under which urban students themselves would come to recognize how mathematics is relevant to their lives and their communities. Using mixed methods, we analyzed the pre- and postassessments and final projects of 25 high school students to investigate what students learned from their experience. We also analyzed the data from video case studies to begin to understand how learning was organized. Our qualitative analysis revealed several tensions that emerged between the goals and norms of our instantiation of a culturally relevant pedagogy and the goals and norms of our mathematics pedagogy. We argue that how these tensions are navigated mediate what opportunity students have for learning statistics. This article provides some considerations and lessons learned that may help inform both teachers who wish to rethink their mathematics pedagogy, and the designers who wish to create culturally relevant curricula.

Notes

¹As this article focuses on the mapping and statistics portion of the larger seminar, we do not discuss the instructional objectives for the social science aspect of the seminar.

²A fifth question was added to the posttest only, but was not included in this analysis to make the tests comparable. The fifth question addressed how students reasoned about correlations between variables based on scatter plots and contingency tables. This was not part of the Konold et al. (2002) interview, but was a conceptual affordability of the GIS software.