And So It Begins

As we begin to gather research and refine our project goals, we have tweaked our topic. Here it is, once again: How can social justice math help connect curriculum to community for students in urban school districts?

We targeted Newark for our urban center, and decided we would research social justice math, tour the city to come up with issues and ideas upon which a lesson plan/unit incorporating social justice math could be built. On Friday, April 3, Mark, Jin and I did a walking tour of Newark. We crisscrossed Newark several times, getting a feel for the downtown and the surrounding wards and taking lots of pictures. We specifically targeted the following high schools and their neighborhoods: Shabazz, East Side, Barringer, and Science Park High.

I was amazed at the size of Shabazz, and the beautiful, modern looking addition (main building?). Shabazz had a lot of wide open space around it, and a great field and field house across the street – more like a small college campus feel than a high school. Shabazz was the nicest structure in the neighborhood.

East Side reminded me of Hoboken. The school is right in the middle of a city block, with a nicely design city park across the street. The building itself was unremarkable, kind of mundane looking. The neighborhood was old, small single and multi-family homes, but did not have a closed in feeling thanks to the open space across the street from the school. There were many school-age kids playing ball in the park.

Barringer was kind of tucked into the end of a block. This was a formidable looking school. The first thing you see is a gigantic model airplane in front of the building, denoting its air and space studies. If you walk the length of Barringer, you run right smack into the parking lot of a beautiful cathedral that looks more like it belongs in Italy than in Newark, NJ. The neighborhood was tightly packing in with older small homes and small corner stores.

Science Park High was a modern, interesting looking building. The neighborhood had larger, older homes, and was fairly well kept up. Kids lingered on the steps of the schools, talking. This was the only school we saw kids just hanging out in front of the building.

We also walked through and photographed some areas of obvious gentrification. Some of the developments were gated communities. Many of the buildings were low 1- and 2-story townhouses, and were very pretty and well kept. Some of the townhomes were surrounded by construction and gutted buildings. Not many felt like settled communities. They looked a bit lonely and desolate.

One thing we kept bringing up on our walking tour was that we kept seeing the same conglomeration of stores: fried chicken, check cashing, flat tire repair, mom and pop corner store, liquor store. We began to wonder about city planning in general. Why so few banks, so few large supermarkets, so much fast food and few sit-down restaurants? How does this affect residents’ daily lives? As we talked it over, we began to formulate some ideas for possible lesson plans to incorporate social justice math. Mark laid out a rough draft of a lesson idea (below).


INTRODUCTION:
What is social justice math?
History of...
Where is it being used? Urban/suburban/rural schools?
Advantages/disadvantages, concerns

BODY:
demographics of Newark, NJ
discussion of walking tour, photos - impressions of the downtown, neighborhoods, gentrification, high
schools (Shabazz, East Side, Barringer, Science Park High)
unit of outlined lessons teachers in Newark high schools could implement to connect local
projects/issues/concerns to math curriculum

One possible lesson plan:

CITY PLANNING/For a potential lesson/unit, have students go to each of the different wards in Newark (with parental supervision and I guess a car unless they're seniors) and canvas one square mile. Different groups could go to different square miles. In their drive around, they would list and tally the different types of stores (auto place, fast food place, mom & pop grocery, liquor store, etc). They would then bring these stats back to class and determine a class average amongst the groups. Next they would learn of pick's theorem and use that to calculate the square mileage of each ward. Then using proportions and maybe excel, students can predict the number of each type of store in each ward.From here, students could compare and contrast the different wards. Then have students participate in a similar survey of several suburban areas (like Ridgewood or Summit), and have them use similar store-groupings to list and tally types. Using pick's theorem again and proportions, they could compare a suburban area to an urban area. Maybe they could also use some of the stats listed on that webpage to compare populations, average incomes, and people per square mile out of which they could ask and think through critical questions concerning equity.

CONCLUSION:
Summary of what we learned about SJM
SJM's usefulness in urban classrooms
How SJM can be applied to Newark high school math classrooms

QUANTITATIVE DATA:
statistics, demographics of Newark, NJ
statistics, demographics of schools

QUALITATIVE DATA:
interviews with professors familiar with/using SJM
walking tour of Newark neighborhoods surrounding several high schools, photos
research on SJM and related topics: ethnomathematics