Enyedy, N., & Danish, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of classroom culture and culturally relevant pedagogy: What students’ arguments around maps reveal about how to increase student achievement within our diverse society. Paper presented at the International Society for Culture and Activity Research, Sevilla Spain.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes data from the Community Mapping Project (CMP), a set of activities within a summer seminar for high school students. CMP was designed based on the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy to create conditions where students would appropriate statistics as a tool for identifying and describing inequities that face their communities. An analysis of pre- and post- assessments revealed measurable improvement in the students’ statistics understanding. However, fine-grained analysis of the classroom video revealed several tensions that arose between the three social justice goals of the curriculum and the instructional objective of learning statistics. This paper uses activity theory as a lens to identify and describe these tensions.