Engaging teachers in the combination of statistical investigation and social justice: Fairness in school funding

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

Department/School

Mathematics

Publication Title

Mathematics Teacher Educator

Abstract

This article describes how we built on the work of Aguirre et al. (2019) regarding integrating mathematical modeling and social justice in teacher education to similarly combine statistical investigations with social justice in teacher education. Aguirre et al. (2019) developed a conceptual interaction between discussions of social justice and the mathematical modeling process, depicted in Figure 1a. The goal of this interaction was to create a model for designing teachers’ learning experiences that strengthen their understanding of mathematical modeling and encourage using mathematics to scrutinize and critique fairness in social issues. In the teacher education materials (Casey et al., 2019) developed for the MODULE(S2) project (available at www.modules2.com), we adapted this interaction to guide our design of statistical investigations that would support teachers in learning statistics and issues of social justice in a synergistic way. In our adaptation of Aguirre et al.’s work, we replaced the mathematical modeling cycle with the statistical investigation cycle (Bargagliotti et al., 2020) (see Figure 1b). The adaptation is needed for two reasons. The yellow phases of the statistical investigation cycle require focus on a dataset, whereas the analogous yellow phases in mathematical modeling could be data-centric but are not required to be. Regarding the blue phases, the idea of a “solution” being produced by the mathematical modeling cycle does not translate to the statistical investigation cycle, which never produces a definitive answer that one would call a “solution.”

Comments

S. Casey and A. Ross are faculty members in EMU's Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

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