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Culturally Responsive Teaching of Mathematics Section Editor: Darryl Corey

In light of recent events, the Virginia Board of Education has added a standard on culturally responsive teaching and equitable practices in the classroom. Culturally responsive teaching is a research - based approach to teaching. It connects students' cultures, languages, and life experiences with what they learn in school. These connections help students access rigorous curriculum and develop higher - level academic skills. Submissions for this section should be sent to dcorey3@radford.edu Implementing a Rethinking Schools Lesson Plan in Middle School Mathematics

Alexander S. Moore

Culturally Responsive (CR) pedagogy has gained increasing attention in recent years due to its well developed philosophy (Ladson - Billings, 1995, 2014) and well - documented benefits (Averill et al., 2009; Liu, 2020). Despite this, CR can seem daunt ing to learn about, much less adopt as one ’ s curric ulum and instruction philosophy. CR lesson plans may seem contextually foreign to a teacher, may seem difficult to justify to colleagues and adminis trators, or just seem to be difficult to understand and implement effectively. However, these con cerns should not preclude one from becoming a CR teacher because the result is extremely empow ering, if approached with enough support. One of the primary hurdles to overcome is learning how to write a CR lesson plan. Novice teachers in the CR realm can find a lesson plan from a published re source such as Rethinking Schools , and then adapt ing that lesson to fit one ’ s particular needs in terms of class structure, content, and so forth. In this arti cle, I discuss a CR lesson plan from the book Re thinking Mathematics and how I adapted it to fit my particular class needs as an Algebra I teacher. Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers (“ RM ”; Gutstein & Peterson, 2013) is a teacher resource book containing lesson ideas that have been turned into articles by teach ers who either developed the ideas and/or imple

mented them. One of the articles (Gutstein, 2013) focuses on the living reality of minimum wage, an issue that is especially important to discuss with students in the 2021 aftermath of COVID - 19 and the “ work shortage ” that minimum wage business es are currently facing. While the media posits that the problem is with the workers (i.e., that they can make more money on unemployment so that ’ s why no one wants to work), this lesson plan reveals that the actual issue lies with the minimum wage itself. In the lesson, students explore the reality of living and paying for expenses if one has a minimum wage job, the exact jobs that are currently experi encing a worker shortage. Through the lesson, stu dents learn that it is not actually an issue with find ing workers (cf. those who would rather stay home and receive unemployment), but rather it is an is sue of finding people who are willing to work and simultaneously be locked into a life of poverty (viz. work for minimum wage). The fact that this paradox is one of the symptoms of late - stage capi talism is beyond the scope of the present article, but this lesson can certainly be extended to have such a discussion afterwards, perhaps as an inter disciplinary lesson with a social studies or history teacher. I taught this lesson in a 7th grade Algebra I class to coincide with a unit on functions and data analysis. The related SOLs are listed in the lesson plan. To

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 47, no. 2

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