Chapter 26: Math Education and Social Justice: Gatekeepers, Politics and Teacher Agency

This article addresses several urgent mathematics education conversations through the lens of critical educators. As teacher educators, we see and hear the experiences pre-service and in-service teachers undertake while teaching math that is grounded in social justice, or when thinking through teaching math using pedagogies rooted in emancipatory frameworks. We deconstruct the resistance to teaching math that is grounded in social justice education. The two overarching conversations we address are:

(1) The gatekeepers that surface for teachers who teach mathematics with an emphasis on social inequity. Gatekeepers are those individuals or groups of people who are perceived as potentially expressing dissatisfaction with the teachers’ choice of social justice pedagogies, e.g., a principal or parents. For many pre-service and practicing teachers, the conversation regarding gatekeepers is more about perceptions they have regarding the struggles they will face when faced with gatekeepers within the structure of the school system than with actual realities.