Everywhere in Life There Are Numbers

Abstract

This essay looks at reflective questions most teachers struggle with. These self-analytic questions are framed by two books in particular, Eric Gutstein's Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics and Gutstein and Peterson's Rethinking Mathematics, that advocate for the inclusion of social justice pedagogy in mathematics curriculum. This essay uses these two books to talk about the relationship between social justice educators (in all disciplines, not just mathematics) and the students they teach. Using the discussion found in both books, I argue that who we are teaching matters in how we combine social justice and academics in the classroom and that the families and communities of our students need to be actively engaged in our efforts to connect academic knowledge to social justice. I situate my argument in the writing of Paolo Freire and contemporary U.S. critical theorists currently looking at the intersection of social justice, critical theory and pedagogy.