Chapter 10: Connecting Community, Critical, and Classical Knowledge in Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice

In this article, I describe conceptually, and give an example of, an aspect of teaching mathematics for social justice—teachers’ attempts to connect three forms of knowledge: community, critical, and classical. The setting is a Chicago public high school, oriented toward social justice, whose students are all low-income African Americans and Latinas/os. Drawing from the experience of creating and teaching a mathematics project that emerged from a central disruption in the life of the school community, I discuss complexities and challenges of creating curriculum from students’ lived experiences that simultaneously develops their critical sociopolitical consciousness and mathematical proficiencies.