Middle School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice

Opportunities to improve student mathematics achievement and outcomes: Building student–teacher relationships and the integration of inclusive and equity‐minded teaching practices

“…Oversimplification of the complexities of teaching is not our intention here, as we know that strengthening studentteacher relationships will not simply diminish tensions, challenges, and barriers that teachers may experience when taking up inclusive and equity-minded practices (e.g., Bartell, 2013;Felton-Koestler, 2017;Gutstein, 2009). Nor do we mean to oversimplify the complexities of and the varied, rich, and ever-expanding literature in the field around accessible and equity-minded teaching practices in mathematics (for starting places, we recommend resources endorsed by the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators Equity Committee, found at https://amte.net/content/ equity-committee-0 [Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2023], the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics resources, found at https://www.nctm.org/ socialjustice/ [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2023], and a series of books with mathematics lessons to explore, understand, and respond to social injustice: Bartell et al, 2023;Berry et al, 2020;Conway et al, 2022;and Koestler et al, 2022). We are simply offering the idea of strengthening studentteacher relationships as a bridge or vehicle that can be used to engage in inclusive and equity-minded teaching practices with the hope of increasing student outcomes.…”