Eva Thanheiser
“Math can help you figure out who you are and why you are the way you are, or it can help you feel a sense of belonging because you see yourself reflected.”
About the article:
This post is a part of an ongoing series in which I interview educators and education researchers to supplement the articles on AJ’s Takes on Why. All speakers have my sincerest gratitude and are acknowledged below.
Speaker Bio
Eva Thanheiser is a professor and Chair of Mathematics Education at Portland State University whose research explores how elementary and middle school mathematics can be taught with socially connected activities. Her work focuses on designing tasks that connect students’ lived experiences and social justice to mathematics learning.
What inspired your research interests?
When we think about math, most people think about it as a sequence of courses. You take elementary, middle, and high school, and it ends in calculus if you’re “advanced”, and I'm putting quotation marks here.
That's not exclusively what math is. That's one piece of math. I think math is also making sense of the world. So, figuring out, for example, in the political climate, does what people are saying make sense? One of the tasks I use a lot is one where we look at representation in Congress since the Voting Rights Act, and how it has changed over time. We use math to understand things like where we are, whether it's fair, and what it means to be fair.
So that's something that I would say is an essential part of math, and if we don't bring that in, it's really hard for students often to see why they might need these things. And another part is really more about identity. Math can help you figure out who you are and why you are the way you are, or it can help you feel a sense of belonging because you see yourself reflected. So if it's always a bunch of white guys that we cite, then none of us other people will see ourselves reflected there. Even more drastic for people of color, or women of color. We're just now having these movies where we actually see what contributions women of color made. So I feel like math is just much broader, and within that, I think that one of the goals of math education should be that you go out into the world and use math to make it better.
And about your math-as-three-frames idea, do you have any studies you think could build on it, or that you would like to do in an ideal world, to help develop teaching methodologies around it?
Yeah, so I actually have a paper under review where I studied my own teaching, and I taught a class that was called The Mathematics of Racism. So it was like a social justice math class. And it was a capstone course at the university.
In this course, we, as a class, were gonna talk about racism, about income inequality, and similar things. Obviously, I can't come in on day one and say, ‘All right, now discuss your experience with racism,’ because that's just not how it works.
One of my current research foci is this idea of you have to establish belonging and community in a class because the only way you learn is to put out there what you don't know. But the only way you put out there what you don't know is if you feel that there's a community and you're not gonna be ridiculed for it. And so I'm now making this argument that any class, any math class, needs to not just hope there's community, but build in activities to create community.
The way we do it in our class, the first week we literally just get to know each other. And then in the second week, we do an activity where we shrink the world population down to 100 people and then examine it. And that's like not as critical yet.
One of the things all my students do—and again, this is college—I give them a thing called an identity wheel. It’s a wheel that has all kinds of characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, etc., around it to help people think through.
Because I've had several white men in my class say, ‘This is the first time I'm introducing myself as a white man.’ Because they never had to think about it. And so I give them the wheel, and then I tell them to introduce themselves. I don't tell them what they have to do. It's just a help, but pick something you want to share and share.
I share very honestly with them. And so that's where we get to know each other. Then we slowly build on it. So we also get to know who everybody is and what the different experiences and strengths are that students bring into the class.
And then, so we keep going. Anyway, I have a paper where I followed my students and we looked at their definitions of racism and math from the beginning to the end of the course. And their definition of racism went pretty much from thinking that it's an intentional individual act to understanding that it's baked into the system. And that's huge. Because you can't understand why things don't work if you don't understand that it's baked into the system. Then in math, they mostly went from frame one only to seeing multiple frames. And many of them credit this move to the belonging and community pieces that we did.
