While internationally there is considerable interest among mathematics educators in social justice, the literature on mathematics teacher education for social justice is nearly nonexistent (Gates and Jorgensen, 2009). Among the limited existing literature is research such as Garii and Rule's (2009), describing student teachers' difficulties in planning lessons to integrate social justice with mathematics and science concepts. Garii and Rule concluded that student teachers needed additional support and guidance from faculty, extended over time, in order to develop their knowledge and confidence to present lessons meeting both academic and societal needs. For example, one difficulty faced is that teachers may have limited experience in making connections between the mathematics they teach and the real-world uses in technological and professional practice (Garii and Okumu, 2008).

DeFreitas and Zolkower (2009) explained how social semiotics tasks may enhance teachers' preparation to teach for diversity as well as their disposition toward mathematics and beliefs about the relationship between mathematics and social justice. Boylan (2009) emphasized the connection between emotionality and mathematics teaching for social justice, suggesting the need to create space for dialogue about emotional aspects of mathematics teaching and about sometimes oppressive and alienating mathematics classroom practices. Aside from occasional recent studies such as these, practically speaking, almost no attention has been given thus far to preparing preservice teachers to teach mathematics for social justice. Additional research is sorely needed.

The Mathematics Education in the Public Interest (MEPI) project is centered on goals to support equity and social justice in mathematics teacher education. MEPI's foundation rests on an assertion that mathematics curriculum and instruction can be improved by maintaining overlapping objectives that:

• Incorporate National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) standards-based reform practices;
  
• Are more culturally relevant and responsive (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1995);
  
• Make use of individuals' and groups' funds of knowledge (e.g., Civil, 2007; Moll and Gonzales, 2004);
  
• Engage learners more fully, more meaningfully, and more responsibly with their communities (e.g., Hart, Donnelly, Youniss, and Atkins, 2007); and
  
• Explicitly aim to achieve social justice locally and globally (e.g., Frankenstein, 1989; Gutstein, 2006).
  

In recent years, an increasing number of mathematics educators have begun to ground mathematical investigations in meaningful personal and social contexts. A small group of teachers and researchers have begun to document students' experiences and learning from this process, as well as their own experiences and learning. Classroom practices and studies such as those in Rethinking Mathematics (Gutstein and Peterson, 2005) are among those helping to break the ground for defining and shaping mathematics education in new ways. For example, Turner and Strawhun (2005: 86) described New York City middle school students' mathematical investigations of overcrowding at their school, concluding: "Not only did opportunities to engage in responsive action support students' sense of themselves as people who can and do make a difference, but using mathematics as a tool to support their actions challenged students' view of the discipline." Brantlinger (2005) provided Chicago students with opportunities to research, assess, and compare the density of movie theaters, liquor stores, and community centers in their own communities to those in a mixed-income suburb. Brantlinger communicated the challenges and sometimes pitfalls of teaching mathematics in sociopolitical contexts, also suggesting the activity was powerful for many students.

This article describes research conducted in a junior-level Mathematics for Social Analysis course for elementary and middle grades preservice teachers, as part of the MEPI project. We summarize preservice teachers' overall reflections on their experiences in the course, and we discuss their experiences with writing K–8 mathematics lesson plans/units centered on social issues. We explain preservice teachers' struggles to balance emphases on mathematics, reform-based pedagogy, and social issues in these lessons. We describe the use of traditional and/or nonchallenging mathematics, the trivializing of social issues, the arbitrary connecting of social issues and mathematics, and the creation of artificial connections and questions about the social issues. We conclude by summarizing lessons learned from these challenges.

Math for Social Analysis

Math for Social Analysis is the third course in a three-course sequence of mathematics content courses for preservice teachers. All elementary and middle grades preservice teachers are required to take Mathematics Content for Teachers I and II, both of which are prerequisites for Math for Social Analysis. Math for Social Analysis is a required course in the elementary education program and is a strongly recommended course in the middle school education program. After completing this mathematics sequence, students later take a mathematics methods course in the education program.

Math for Social Analysis integrates mathematics content, reform-based pedagogy, and critical analysis of social issues. Preservice teachers and faculty identify social issues, such as endangered species, distribution of wealth, and child labor. We encourage preservice teachers to identify and use multiple mathematical methods to understand the relevant mathematics content and to become informed and to critique the social issues. Each classroom unit of study or semester project engages preservice teachers in group learning, and we encourage involvement based on the studies, which may contribute to positive social change.

In Math for Social Analysis, students choose between a service-learning option and a group research/teaching project option. For the group research/teaching project, each group of two to four students choose a social issue on a local, national, or global level. The group studies the issue, writing a research paper to answer the research question of their interest. Next, groups create two or three related mathematics lesson plans, including the relevant NCTM standards and state standards of learning across all disciplines relevant to the lesson. They then teach their classmates the issue, including the pertinent mathematics. Teaching the social issue across disciplines is encouraged, and the use of multiple solution methods to enhance the understanding of the mathematics is expected. We further expect preservice teachers to use inquiry-based and hands-on lessons, focusing on helping learners develop a deep understanding of elementary and middle school concepts.

For the service learning project, preservice teachers work with a local nonprofit community organization supporting low to moderate income families. They attend an orientation session and training sessions on discipline and conflict resolution and on cultural and economic diversity. Preservice teachers work with children at different after-school programs three hours each week, engaged in mentoring, tutoring, mediation, discipline, and activity planning and implementation (both mathematics-related and otherwise). They assist during recess and snack time and ride the bus as a chaperone or walk children home, thereby learning about their communities. Preservice teachers also prepare and present five mathematical activities designed to meet the interests and needs of the children assigned to them. One activity must include children's literature, two must address a social issue appropriate for the age of the children, and the remaining two are open. Each week, preservice teachers write reflections on their experiences. At the end of the semester, preservice teachers present to their classmates on experiences and learning over the semester.

Analysis

Final project lesson plan and course reflection assignments from fifty-two preservice teachers taking Math for Social Analysis in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 were used as data for this article. Of these preservice teachers, sixteen (or 31 percent) had completed the service learning project option and thirty-six (or 69 percent) had completed the group research/teaching project option. However, regardless of which of the two project options preservice teachers had completed during the semester, all fifty-two preservice teachers completed the final project lesson plan and course reflection assignment. Feedback provided by the course instructor (a co-author of this article) to these preservice teachers was also included as data, given that this feedback addressed the ways in which lesson plans met — or did not meet — project guidelines and requirements for the mathematics content and for the addressing of social issues. All assignments were read and re-read multiple times analyzing overall course reflections as well as issues and challenges associated with creating mathematics lesson plans with social issues. These lesson plan assignments and reflections were coded and sorted to classify the issues and challenges into one or more of four different types, described below. Additionally, we summarize preservice teachers' reflections on their overall experiences of the course, in their own words. Our goal is to document the types of challenges faced overall. We do not aim to differentiate challenges faced by preservice teachers on the final project in relation to which of the two semester projects they had completed, given that those differences were relatively minor.

Issues and Challenges

This assignment [of making lesson plans] was a good way for us to see if we can bring social issues into play with our own ideas, and make it interesting for our future students. It was a helpful way to see how long a lesson on a social issue will take to plan, and how we want to bring the issue and mathematics together without forgetting about the [state standards]. Knowing that the [state standards] must be included in a lesson is going to make having a social issue relevant to that particular [standard] more challenging than if there were no standards of learning that the teachers were forced to follow.  — Amy, preservice teacher in Math for Social Analysis class

Our public-interest approach counters the traditional approach of teaching mathematics in mostly context-free environments or using artificial applications. In our approach, preservice teachers and faculty identify social issues of personal or professional interest for examination. Preservice teachers participate in determining which mathematical techniques provide insight on the issue. This encourages preservice teachers to listen to their data and draw their own conclusions on the issue, based on their mathematical analysis and understanding of the issue within context. Each classroom unit of study or semester project includes discussion in ways to take action and contribute to positive change. For example, one successful project asked students to think critically about the amount of clean water available in countries across the world and emphasized water conservation. Students estimated their own average daily water usage, compared and graphed average per capita water consumption in numerous countries, located those countries on a world map, examined children's books related to water conservation, converted water usage to different units of measure, discussed difficulties people face in countries where access to clean water is less, and calculated ways to reduce their own water usage.

In creating their lesson plans for their final projects, preservice teachers are reminded of the importance of teaching the mathematics itself, in the context of a social issue. This requirement is in contrast to the idea that a lesson might focus only on the social issue and assume students already know the required mathematics. For example, assignment guidelines require that if the lesson plan are carried out in a classroom, students must understand the mathematical topic in more than one way. Additionally in their lesson plans, preservice teachers are asked, specifically, to explain how they will teach the mathematics for understanding, such as through the use of manipulatives and/or drawings.

Overall, nearly all preservice teachers' projects demonstrated at least one high-quality component among mathematics, reform-based pedagogy, or social issues. However, some preservice teachers struggled to produce high quality in all three of these components at the same time. We characterize these struggles related to quality among the three components as a problem of balance. Many of the examples provided below simultaneously represent multiple challenges and are labeled as they are for descriptive purposes only. We organized the challenges they faced as:

• Use of mathematics without mathematics instruction;
  
• Use of traditional and/or nonchallenging mathematics;
  
• Trivializing of social issues; and
  
• Disconnect or artificial connections between social issues and the mathematics.
  

Use of Mathematics without Mathematics Instruction

One of the greatest challenges facing preservice teachers as they created MEPI lesson plans was the challenge of not only using mathematics in their lessons addressing social issues, but also simultaneously or in partnership teaching the relevant mathematics in their lessons. For example, one group of preservice teachers studied healthy diets and compared the old Food Pyramid and new MyPyramid. One of their related lesson plans involved having students use multiple fast food restaurant menus to select meals and then calculate the number of calories consumed by selecting meals that fit into the serving sizes specified in MyPyramid. Although the group's lessons proved interesting and informative according to our classroom standards for addressing social issues, nowhere in the lessons did the preservice teachers teach students how to do the mathematical operations required to answer the questions they posed.

Use of Traditional and/or Non-Challenging Mathematics

Occasionally mixed into preservice teachers' lesson plans on social issues were traditional mathematics worksheets with numerous procedural problems, such as a page of addition problems. Although we explicitly emphasized our expectations for lessons in writing and verbally, and we also modeled the kind of instruction we wanted to support, sometimes students paid too little attention to the mathematics component of their lessons. They struggled to balance quality emphasis on the social issues with quality emphasis on the mathematics, often using elementary school mathematics in relevant ways for understanding the social issues, but then teaching the mathematics in using very traditional approaches. In other cases, the mathematics content was trivialized or nearly nonexistent.

As an example of the most blatant limitations in mathematics content, one group of preservice teachers focused their lesson plan project on supporting animal shelters. One mathematics activity involved having students find the total number of cats and the total number of dogs in pictures. Included in their lesson packet was a worksheet of numerous simple calculations such as 4+4, 6+3, and 5+6. Other activities included a "connect the dots" of a dog and a rabbit. Sometimes, the social issue became so prominent in lesson plans that preservice teachers needed to be reminded of the need to focus on rigorous, challenging mathematics. We find ourselves sometimes having to rule out overly simplistic approaches to mathematics, such as by announcing to groups, "Please don't do 'Connect the dots.'   "

Trivializing of Social Issues

In their attempts to connect mathematics with social issues, sometimes preservice teachers gave only cursory attention to the social issues. For example, one of our preservice teachers who chose the service-learning project described her intentions to create an activity addressing weather pattern changes and natural resource depletion. However, the mathematics activity she produced included seemingly random and isolated "social issue math word problems," none of which were based on any real-world data, such as:

A forest in California contains thirty-five acres of trees. With all of the forest fires happening lately twenty-five of the acres have burnt down. How many acres are left in the forest?

A farmer has seventy-seven acres of corn growing on his farm. Since there has been a drought, a lot of his corn is dying and he can only harvest thirty-three acres. How many acres have died because of the lack of water?

Disconnect or Artificial Connections between Social Issues and the Mathematics

Another struggle faced by preservice teachers was the effort to make meaningful connections between the social issues and the mathematics. Students created word problems with sometimes only cursory connections to the social issue at hand, or they asked questions where no one would care about the answer to those questions. For example, one preservice teacher completed a project addressing the topic of recycling in relationship to human consumption and waste. As the mathematical focus of his work, he chose the calculation of the weight of objects discarded or recycled, also addressing conversion of units.

However, he did not seem to realize this mathematical emphasis added no value to understanding the social issue. Without drawing connections to the topic of recycling, his mathematics lesson included mathematics questions such as:

• If an apple weighs 14 ounces, how much would that be in pounds?
  
• If a shoe weighs 43 ounces, how many pounds does the shoe weigh?
  
• This preservice teacher did also include more meaningful questions in his lesson, such as, if a family is able to recycle or spare sixty pounds of garbage a week for an entire year, how much trash can the family recycle or spare in a year?
  

Preservice Teachers' Reflections on Overall Experiences

Feedback from preservice teachers on the Math for Social Analysis course has been mixed, but overall very positive. Our research demonstrates that a mathematics classroom focused on social justice can produce tensions for preservice teachers to resolve between their backgrounds with traditional mathematics and their new experiences using social issues and interdisciplinary applications to better understand mathematics and the world around them. Questions and concerns most commonly raised by preservice teachers relate to appropriateness of addressing social issues with elementary school students in general, or in the mathematics classroom in particular, as well as school emphases on "teaching to the test" to prepare children to pass state standardized tests.

Students universally label this course as their first extended experience with learning mathematics in connection with multiple meaningful real-world applications and social issues. Many of our preservice teachers enter Math for Social Analysis describing high levels of mathematics anxiety, and many have suggested that integrating social issues into the mathematics classroom has reduced mathematics anxiety (Mistele and Spielman, 2009),#_ftn1 which generated positive attitudes towards mathematics and teaching mathematics. In Mistele and Spielman (2009), we communicated how Math for Social Analysis proved beneficial in reducing mathematics anxiety among our preservice teachers by increasing the utility of mathematics, redirecting attention away from anxiety, and building confidence to teach.

One strength of the course thus far has been that preservice teachers develop greater understanding of how to integrate social issues and mathematics, and most describe their interest in incorporating social issues into their mathematics classrooms in the future. We have also previously reported on survey results that provided evidence that preservice teachers' views about mathematics and about mathematics teaching changed over the semester (Spielman, 2009). They came to see mathematics as increasingly useful for understanding and engaging with important issues and increasingly connected to home and community experiences. The following comments from Amy (the preservice teacher in Math for Social Analysis class quoted on page 12) summarize many of the preservice teachers' thoughts concerning this course:

I will be able to make a difference for generations to come by making their math experience much better than mine was. . . . I liked learning about all of the different social issues . . . such as mountaintop removal, which I had no clue was happening until this semester . . . I [also] never knew about [manipulatives] such as algeblocks and base-ten blocks that can be used as an aid in teaching math . . . I possibly would have had an easier time with school work in math class . . . instead of just going through the motions and memorizing . . . . I thoroughly enjoyed this class and all of the knowledge that I have gained from it. I am now geared and ready to go out into the world and teach students not only the lessons of math, but also the lessons of what is going on in our world.

Conclusion

Our mathematics teacher education classroom experiences have led us to a better understanding of the complexity of supporting preservice teachers to teach mathematics in the public interest. The challenges of helping preservice teachers who have primarily experienced traditional mathematics classroom instruction to teach in reform-based ways have been well documented in the literature. The use of mathematical applications having social relevance adds a new layer of complexity to mathematics instruction. Mathematics teacher educators will need to make explicit the multiple complex lesson plan objectives when carrying out similar project assignments with preservice teachers, also providing ongoing and detailed feedback to help preservice teachers be successful in their struggles to balance emphases on mathematics, reform-based pedagogy, and social issues. Preservice teachers clearly improved dramatically over the duration of the semester in their abilities to make connections between mathematics and social issues, and they suggested the course helped to reduce their anxiety toward mathematics (e.g., Mistele and Spielman, 2009; Spielman, 2009). However, as is clear from the summary of challenges presented in this paper, and similar to a suggestion made by Garii and Rule's (2009), it may be necessary for preservice teachers to have multiple, extended and mentored experiences with integrating mathematics content with social issues. Preferably, this would include support through a combination of coursework, internships, and student teaching.

Acknowledgments

The research described in this paper is part of the Mathematics Education in the Public Interest project, funded by the National Science Foundation, award number DUE-0837467. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

About the Authors

Laura J. Jacobsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Radford University. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics education at Virginia Tech in 2006. Her primary research interests are in issues of equity and social justice in mathematics education, and she is principal investigator for the Mathematics Education in the Public Interest project funded by the National Science Foundation (Award Number: DUE-0837467). She is also interested in recruitment and retention of under-represented populations in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Contact: mailto:lspielman@radford.edu.

Jean Mistele is an instructor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Radford University and currently on educational leave pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics education at Virginia Tech. She is the co–principal investigator on the Mathematics Education in the Public Interest project, where her major research interest addresses equity issues related to mathematics and other literacy skills for elementary and middle school students. Other interests include researching reading skills associated with the mathematics textbook and mathematics specialists programs for professional development of in-service teachers. Contact: mailto:jmistele@radford.edu

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[1] Laura Jacobsen Spielman recently changed her name to Laura J. Jacobsen. Thus, references to Spielman are likewise references to the first author in the current article.