Chapter 4: Knowing the World Through Mathematics: Development of an Undergraduate Mathematics Course for International Social Justice

Students in undergraduate mathematics classes would benefit from opportunities to connect their understandings of mathematical concepts and global inequities to model and shape a more socially just world. In this chapter, we describe the development of an undergraduate quantitative reasoning course, Knowing the World Through Mathematics (KWM), which was inspired by Gutstein’s (2006) Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice (TMSJ) framework. We created the course to raise awareness of students’ own and other’s lived experiences, and to connect these experiences to issues of equity and social justice around the globe through mathematical investigations embedded in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015). Students make use of mathematics, global policy documents, and conceptual frameworks to critically interpret, model, and represent world phenomena. Students collaboratively analyze quantitative information gathered through local and global data sets and individual survey and questionnaire items to investigate local experiences in relation to social injustices. We anticipate that students will be challenged to go beyond assimilating critical mathematics into their own ideologies and recognize trends of inequity and power in the global society through mathematics. Furthermore, students will have opportunities to develop conceptual understandings of mathematics through investigations situated in local and global contexts. This curriculum draws on and contributes to existing TMSJ resources and provides further opportunities to investigate how to effectively develop positive mathematics identities with undergraduate students.