28eric  Œricoâ - Gutstein
28eric  Œricoâ - Gutstein
28eric  Œricoâ - Gutstein
Abstract
This article is about developing and teaching students to read and write the world with
mathematics (RWWM) in an urban Chicago (USA) high school. RWWM is a form of critical
pedagogy using mathematics. The essence of RWWM is that young people use and learn
mathematics to study their social reality—in this way, they more deeply understand their
world as a way to prepare them to become actors in history. RWWM builds on the work
of Paulo Freire and education for humanization and liberation. It also builds on the work
of critical (mathematics) educators across the world who have attempted to “reinvent”
Freire in their own contexts. In this paper, I briefly report on my critical mathematics
classroom where I developed and taught curriculum based on the generative themes of
students’ lives (key social contradictions as students define and articulate them). I give a
short example of students using mathematics to understand displacement in their
community, and point out some possibilities and challenges of doing this work.
Introduction
My twelfth-grade mathematics class was winding down. Students silently and
soberly stared at the numbers I was writing on the board:
150,000 – 291,000 = 92,000
This “equation” modeled a mortgage loan for a house in the students’ neighborhood. As
I wrote on the board, I told students: “You’ve paid two hundred and ninety-one thousand
dollars on a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar mortgage, and you still owe ninety-two
thousand dollars. Check that math out. One hundred and fifty thousand minus two
hundred and ninety-one thousand equals ninety-two thousand.” I paused as students
looked and mumbled to themselves and each other. I continued, “Think about that. Hey!
2
You started with a hundred and fifty—you paid two ninety-one—and you still owe ninety-
two thousand dollars. What’s going on here?”
So went a more-or-less typical day in my class. I taught with the goal that students
learned to read and write the world using mathematics (RWWM; Gutstein, 2006, 2016).
That is, my aim was for students to develop a deep understanding of mathematics through
using it to study their social reality (or “reading the world”), and, while doing this, to create
and extend their own analyses of contradictions in society and their lives. The overall
purpose is to prepare students to change reality as they see fit (i.e., “writing the world”).
This work represents my attempt to reinvent Paulo Freire. As he put it, “in order to
follow me, it is essential not to follow me!” (Freire & Faundez, 1989, p. 30). Freire’s goals
were essentially that education needs to be part of the overall struggle for full
humanization and liberation of all peoples (Freire, 1970/1998). He argued that while
education could not make the world change, the world would not change without
education. That gives education its essential meaning in the process of humans shaping
reality. He also believed firmly that we are unfinished, all of us (Freire, 1998). For him that
was a source of joy, because we are not destined to be something not of our making.
Freire saw history as possibility, that human beings, conscious of our world, both shape
social life while also being influenced by it. In this sense, he considered people as both
subject and object of history. He railed against neoliberal ideology which proclaimed that
“there is no alternative.” Freire’s hope came through his notion of human unfinishedness,
3
and also from his understanding of the dialectical relationship of hope and struggle. He
wrote that without hope, you really cannot begin the struggle, and you certainly won’t be
able to maintain it. But without the struggle, hope stays as a dream, never materializing.
You have to fight to make your hope a reality. He wrote that the two need each other like
fish need clean water (1994).
Freire worked in contexts in the global South, particularly in Latin America (Brazil,
Chile) and in some post-colonial African nations (those colonized by the Portuguese).
Teachers, researchers, workers, peasants, cooperative members, activists, and
revolutionaries have tried to reinvent Freire in other spaces around the world, including in
urban US schools, in communities of color (here I use common US terminology to signify
African American, Latino/a, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native communities). For years,
some US teachers have used Freire’s ideas of supporting critical consciousness linked
to academic study. It is not widespread in US schools, but it definitely exists, and these
efforts are across K-20 settings. Furthermore, there is a whole tradition and history of
education for liberation that grow out of resistance to slavery and education for
“stupidification” (as Macedo, 1994, called it). These liberatory education struggles are part
of the Black freedom struggle in the US and provide insight and inspiration to others as
well (Anderson, 1988; hooks, 1994).
Mathematics education, surprisingly, has been a site of much critical pedagogy
work. Critical mathematics exists in multiple countries, and while it has many definitions,
it is always linked to learning mathematics and working for a better world (Chronaki, 2017;
Skovsmose, 1994; Wager & Stinson, 2012). It often challenges the high status of
mathematical knowledge, its relation to the economy, its racialized aspects, its
exclusionary functions, and many other ideas. In this paper, I give an overview of one
instance of critical mathematics, the one with which I started this paper—my 12th grade
mathematics class in a Chicago public school. I start with a little background, describe
the class, and briefly describe some things we learned and some open questions.
I am a US-born-and-raised mathematics teacher educator at a public university in
Chicago. As part of my work as a professor, I have worked with and taught in Chicago
public schools for 25 years. I am also part of the education justice movement in Chicago,
which primarily has fought to transform public education and against the privatization of
4
education and displacement of economically disadvantaged people of color from the city.
As a mathematics educator, I taught my own mathematics classes for about 5 years in
Chicago public schools (in middle and high school). In these classes, I learned how to
teach critical mathematics. I studied my own practice, worked with students as co-
researchers into what we were learning, and wrote and taught about critical mathematics.
I have co-presented with students at academic and teacher-activists conferences perhaps
two dozen times through the years. All of these have been learning experiences.
The class with which I start this paper was in a school that focused on social
justice—in fact, its name is the Social Justice High School (Sojo for short). Sojo is in a
working-class Chicago community called Lawndale. Because Chicago is so racially
segregated, there are two parts of Lawndale. South Lawndale (or La Villita) is primarily
Mexican immigrant families, while North Lawndale is overwhelmingly African American.
A railroad bridge separates the two parts of the neighborhood. Sojo is located in South
Lawndale and 70% of students were from that community, with about 30% of the students
being African American from North Lawndale. All students were from working-class, low-
income families. I was part of the team that founded the school in 2005. I worked closely
with students and teachers through the first five years of school. In 2008-09, I taught my
own “mathematics for social justice” class, of 21 students from the neighborhood, after
having done similar work in a middle-school in a nearby neighborhood (Gutstein, 2006).
Following Freire, I tried to uncover the generative themes of students’ community.
Freire referred to these themes as the dialectical connections between key social
contradictions in people’s lives and how people understood and acted on them. For
Freire, themes are neither in the world, nor in people, but rather, they are in the human-
world interaction (Freire, 1970/1998). Understanding the people’s generative themes is
an essential and initial component to enacting a Freirean critical pedagogy in schools,
although teachers deepen their own knowledge about the community’s themes as they
teach and learn with young people and adults from the neighborhood.
Although I was familiar with the school’s students and community, it is not my place
to attempt to name their generative themes. Therefore, I met twice with students before
the year I taught them in order to discuss what we would study. Collectively, we agreed
upon five units, one of which was on displacement. This was at the start of the 2008-9
5
global economic crisis, and many people in the US were not able to continue paying their
home mortgages. Banks were repossessing people’s homes (through foreclosures), and
across the US, people were fighting to keep their houses and stay in their communities.
This was especially true in both North and South Lawndale, where foreclosures had
tripled since 2005.
The displacement unit was long—13 weeks, which was one-third of our school
year. The unit’s central question was: Whose Community Is This—Can We Stay In Our
Own Community? There were three main forms of displacement at work in Lawndale, but
they did not affect North and South Lawndale identically. Foreclosures hit both parts of
Lawndale relatively equally. However, the second form of displacement, gentrification
(pushing out less-wealthy residents as house prices and rents increase and more well-off
people move in), affected only North Lawndale because it was slightly closer to downtown
Chicago, located on a highway and two train lines, and had better housing stock than
South Lawndale. Real estate developers were just beginning to build higher cost housing
(condominiums) in North Lawndale as more economically disadvantaged people were
pushed out. And the third form of displacement was deportation, which affected only
South Lawndale and not North Lawndale’s Black community because within South
Lawndale are many thousands of Mexican immigrants who lack official US documents to
be in the country. They live in constant fear of being caught and sent back to Mexico. The
complexity of how displacement impacted the two parts of Lawndale in similar and
different ways was central to the unit.
Students developed essential understandings of these phenomena through using
mathematics. They developed the mathematical equations to model a mortgage. Through
this process, they saw that a Lawndale family making the median income could not afford
a mortgage of $150,000, at the current interest rates. Students realized that one could
borrow $150,000 and over a 30 year period, pay almost twice that amount, while still
owing the bank almost $100,000. This was a lesson in capitalist economics. I told students
explicitly that day, “Understand how banking works—how capitalism works”—but they did
the mathematics to more fully grasp the phenomena.
An important part of a critical pedagogy is that learners are given the opportunity
to “know better what they already know”, as Freire put it, and develop a more complicated
6
comprehension of things that they experience. That is, all my students knew that banks
were foreclosing homes in Lawndale. They knew this because their own families were
losing homes, or struggling hard to save them. They knew this because it was impossible
to walk to school without passing many boarded-up homes, victims of bank foreclosures.
Basically, every street in the school’s neighborhood had boarded-up homes. Students
lived with the ever-present reality of foreclosures, gentrification, and deportation, though
they could not initially explain why these things occurred or why these forms of
displacement particular impacted communities such as their own.
It was the combined reality of all three forms of displacement in Lawndale that
made it a generative theme. Students came to understand foreclosures through using
mathematics, as they learned to create and analyze complicated mathematical entities
called discrete dynamical systems (essentially discrete versions of differential equations).
They used these systems to model the mathematics for various forms of mortgages and
foreclosures. Students studied deportation by analyzing data, examining immigration
trends, and looking at labor section employment. And they developed the mathematics of
gentrification in ways similar to analyzing mortgages. As the forms of displacement
affected the class, school, and community differently in the two parts of Lawndale, my
political goal of the unit was for students to use and learn mathematics to realize the whys
and how of their experiences. I wanted them to uncover that despite surface-level
distinctions, when one traced the source of the displacement impacting both parts of the
community, one would understand that there is the same system of racial capitalism that
treats both communities as sources of profit. Mathematics became a way of
understanding many of the complexities involved in the plundering of working-class
communities of color where my students lived (Gutstein, 2016).
Though students learned both mathematics and about their social reality, there
were (and are) many challenges. First, my political goal in the unit could not easily be
reached. A long, intense effort is needed to fully unpack how global financial markets
work at local levels. Second, US students, especially economically disadvantaged
students and students of color, are poorly educated. Their understanding of mathematics
is often weak through no fault of their own. Some students perform well on tests and
memorization tasks, but cannot use mathematics in the world, let alone analyze social
7
reality with it. That means that teachers may have to spend extra time supporting students
mathematically. Third, pressures of test and performance weigh heavily on both students
and teachers. College is very expensive and student debt is enormous (estimates for US
students are around $1.5 trillion). Tests are often necessary to gain financial assistance,
and usually only the most successful students in school win scholarships. This is very
stressful to students. Furthermore, school test scores become part of school districts’
argument for closing schools, which leads to, and is part of, privatization of education and
displacement (Lipman, 2011). This impacts all the families and school staff. It means that
students must do well on the tests which severely constrains the time, energy, and
initiative of teachers who want to teach students to read their world with mathematics.
There are other difficulties, particularly for teachers. While research documents
what mathematical and pedagogical knowledge teachers need to teach students to
understand mathematics conceptually (e.g., Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008), how to
develop critical mathematics teachers is not well understood. Critical mathematics
demands that teachers teach about both mathematics and social reality, in connected
ways. The synthesis is difficult and learning how to orchestrate it takes substantial time.
There’s a dialectical relationship between supporting students to learn the mathematics
they need for various forms of school success—while simultaneously fostering their
critical perspectives on the world. Teacher and students together are involved in a “dance”
between mathematics and sociopolitical reality, in a continuum between two connected
poles. Sometimes, in my Sojo class, we only did decontextualized mathematics, though
not often. Sometimes, we only studied a real-world situation, also infrequently. But mostly,
we were somewhere in the space that more or less connected mathematics and
sociopolitical reality, emphasizing one or the other, moving back and forth and
interrelating the two. The more students grasped the mathematics, the better they
realized, overall, what was happening to their community; the better they comprehended
their reality using mathematics, the more mathematics made sense as an explanatory
and revealing phenomenon.
This back-and-forth space is where one wants to be, where students see the
relationships between mathematics and social reality, and each supports the other. The
displacement affected my students, who saw foreclosed houses and experienced it
8
Conclusion
I have tried to briefly sketch out how one can reinvent Freire in a high school
mathematics class in the global North, far from Freire’s culture circles in rural Brazil or
Chile, or from other venues in which he worked. My experiences have taught me that
there are no shortcuts to learning how to teach critical mathematics. Indeed, it may be
that teachers’ involvement in political activity and the life struggles of the communities in
which they teach may be the most important source for the political knowledge that
teachers need to teach young people to read and write the world with mathematics
(Gutstein, 2018). Freire argued that a source of learning for teachers about learners’
generative themes lay in teachers’ participation in social movements. He wrote that
...a radical and critical education has to focus on what is taking place today inside
various social movements and labor unions. Feminist movements, peace
movements, and other such movements that express resistance generate in their
practice a pedagogy of resistance. (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 61)
That is, one learns to engage in political struggles and social movements through being
part of them. Freire (1970/1998) wrote, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
9
References
Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press. doi:10.5149/uncp/9780807842218
Ball, D. L., Thames, M. H., Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What
makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education, 59, 389-407.
Chronaki, A. (2017). Proceedings of the ninth international mathematics education and
society conference. Volos, Greece: University of Thessaly Press.
Freire, P. (1970/1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York,
NY: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of hope. (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum
10
Freire, P., & Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to question: A pedagogy of liberation. (T.
Coates, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.
Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Westport, CT:
Bergin & Garvey.
Gutstein, E. (2006). Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Toward a pedagogy
for social justice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Gutstein, E. (2016). “Our issues, our people—math as our weapon”: Critical mathematics
in a Chicago neighborhood high school. Journal for Research in Mathematics
Education, 47, 454-504.
Gutstein, E. (2018). The struggle is pedagogical: Learning to teach critical mathematics.
In P. Ernest (Ed), Philosophy of mathematics education today (pp. 131-143).
Springer.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Lipman, P. (2011b). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race,
and the right to the city. New York, NY: Routledge.
Macedo, D. (1994). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Skovsmose, O. (1994). Towards a philosophy of critical mathematical education. Boston,
MA: Kluwer Academic. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-3556-8
Wager, A. A., & Stinson, D. W. (2012). Teaching mathematics for social justice:
Conversations with educators. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics.
Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.
Alternative Proxies: