Black History Month 2022: Featuring Bob Moses

Today, I want to argue, the most urgent social issue affecting poor people of color is economic access. In today’s world, economic access and full citizenship depend crucially on math and science literacy. I believe that the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961. I believe we can get the same kind of consensus we had in the 1960s for the effort of repairing this. And I believe that solving the problem requires exactly the kind of community organizing that changed the South in the 1960s. This has been my work—and that of the Algebra Project—for the past twenty years (5).

Elite private schools and elite public schools prepared their students to become America’s leaders, but all other schools belonged to an era in which work and preparation for work were defined by factories and assembly lines. Factories and the cities they helped create became the models for schools and their school systems, and the work in factories became the model for schooling. Because the new technologies give rise to computers and an ever-widening use of symbol systems and quantitative data, we concluded that the schools and curricula we had to struggle to design must put mathematical and scientific literacy on a par with reading and writing literacy (116).

Education is still basically Jim Crow as far as the kids who are in the bottom economic strata of the country…No one knows about them, no one cares about them (from this interview on NPR).

The Algebra Project is founded on the idea that the ongoing struggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is now linked to an issue of math and science literacy. This idea determines strategies and choices made about organization, dissemination, and content of the curriculum. It’s important to make it clear that even the development of some sterling new curriculum—a real breakthrough—would not make us happy if it did not deeply and seriously address the issue of access to literacy for everyone. That is what is driving the project. The Algebra Project is not simply about transferring a body of knowledge to children. It’s about using that knowledge as a tool to a much larger end (14-15).

There are a lot of well-trained curriculum experts and others who know a great deal about math, but, I began to tell myself, what is missing from their work is insight into the minds of the young people they are trying to reach. We do not have enough people with a solid enough mastery of math who are so guided by their insights into the students’ ways of thinking they can reconceptualize the math in terms that allow their students to connect (102).

In the Algebra Project we are using a version of experiential learning; it starts where children are, experiences they share. We get them to reflect on these drawing on their common culture, then to form abstract conceptualizations out of their reflection, and then to apply the abstraction back on their experience. You can think of it as a circle or a clock: at twelve noon they have an experience; quarter past they are thinking about it; half past they are doing some conceptual work around their reflections; and at quarter to they are doing applications based on their conceptual work. In the Algebra project this movement from experience to abstraction takes the form of a five-step process that introduces students to the idea that many important concepts of elementary algebra can be accessed through ordinary experiences. Each step is designed to help students bridge the transition from real life to mathematical language and operations. Because of this connection with real life, the transition curriculum is not only experiential but culturally based. The experiences must be meaningful in terms of daily life and the culture of students (119-120).

In academic language, this process can be described as the “social construction of mathematics.” Students learn that math is the creation of people—people working together and depending on one another. Interaction, cooperation, and group communication, therefore, are key components of this process. Students also help generate part of the content of instruction as well. They participate in the physical event that will generate data which becomes the vehicle for introducing mathematical concepts. Cooperation and participation in group activities, as well as personal responsibility for individual work, become important not only for the successful functioning of the learning group, but for the generation of instructional materials and various representations of the data as well (120).

Teachers, of course, are another part of this equation. It should be clear by now that underlying our curriculum and pedagogy is the expectation that teachers will make fundamental changes in the way they teach. They cannot simply be lecturers attempting to pour knowledge into the heads of students who sit passively like inanimate vessels (122).

In my geometry course I ask the students to write in paragraph form and think about how they are going to incorporate their symbols into their sentences. They have to learn how to write expository English that incorporates symbolic representations about quantitative data. They must write whole sentences. The standard way of writing math—just numbers and equations—will not do. They need to come out being able to talk about these numbers. Computers like the graphing calculators are going to give them numbers and the ability to manipulate them, but what do they mean? Who is going to interpret them? My students are proud of their interpretations. They hold on to them, show them around, to their parents, to their friends, as representing something important they have learned (128).

Math literacy is a civil right. Just as Black people in Mississippi saw the vote as a tool to elevate them into the first class politically, math is the tool to elevate the young into the first class economically (quoted in this obituary in The Washington Post).

Just being able to read and write will no longer be enough to make it in this fast-paced knowledge economy. Math literacy will be a liberation tool for people trying to get out of poverty and the best hope for people trying not to get left behind” (from this interview in The Washington Post).