They’re Taking Our Money: Building on the Dialectics of Political and Mathematical Knowledge to Write the World

Justice-oriented mathematics aims to support students’ understanding of the relationship between mathematical knowledge and political knowledge to examine how they conspire to shape reality. The notion of the formatting power of mathematics is helpful here in that it calls for an excavation of mathematics that makes explicit the actual use of mathematics hidden in social structures and routines. In this paper, the author examines how a mathematical unit on home mortgages was carried out to support 12th grade students’ understanding of the mathematics of mortgages, revealing the formatting power that mortgage lenders hold in reordering the reality of marginalized communities. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of student journals, student work, post-class student interviews, and teacher/researcher journals, the findings revealed two pedagogical features that contributed to students’ reading and writing the world with mathematics: engaging mathematics from multiple directions and attending to the formatting power of the mathematical and political knowledge dialectic. These findings offer pedagogical guidance for practitioners and teacher educators in curriculum design and implementation of critical mathematics.