ABSTRACT: One approach to promoting successful engagement of underrepresented groups in mathematics classrooms is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). However, it has been argued that CRP risks essentializing students or watering down academic content. We report our analysis of a case study of a group of three 6th grade students who took part in a 6-week mathematics curriculum. This curriculum used Geographical Information System (GIS) maps to engage students in designing personally meaningful research projects while learning about measures of central tendency (i.e., learning statistics). The case study was chosen as representative of how students in this urban classroom (47 total) successfully navigated the curriculum. While successful, the intervention highlights the kinds of negotiations that students engaged in with each other, the teacher, and the curriculum as they co-constructed their own meaning of relevance. The goal of our analysis is to illustrate the importance of recognizing multiple forms of relevance and supporting ongoing negotiations of these multiple forms.

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.