Democracy and Algebra

In 2014, a team of educators and all of the eighth-grade students at a “failing school” in Nashville, Tennessee, took up the challenge of teaching and learning Algebra 1. This was in the context of a constrained standardized-test-driven public school environment in which less than 20 percent of these students had achieved proficiency in seventh-grade math. Here, we tell the story of that year through the lens of literature that inspired and helps explain this work: Robert Moses’s Algebra Project, Walter Feinberg’s conceptualization of democratic mathematics education, and practice-based research about collaborative, equitable mathematics teaching. We foreground ideas about equitable math education alongside pedagogical decisions, interactions, and outcomes to characterize this not-so-simple decision as both democratic and potentially revolutionary because it was integrated with democratic structures and habits already established in the school. We conclude with a focus on what those who aspire to teach (mathematics) democratically might learn from this case.