Engaging Mathematics Faculty Partners Cathy Evins and Barbara Gonzalez

Roosevelt University Uses Chicago’s Social Justice Issues to Teach Algebra

NCSCE’s Engaging Mathematics initiative is dedicated to applying the SENCER approach to mathematics courses, with the goal of making the subject more accessible and interesting to students.

Roosevelt University’s math professors Cathy Evins and Barbara Gonzalez will develop a new algebra course that couples math instruction with important social justice challenges in the city of Chicago, including transportation, crime, water, food access, infrastructure, and demographics.

The course will be “flipped,” meaning that students will learn basic algebra skills outside of class, and then spend class time applying those skills to word problems. Eventually, Evins and Gonzalez plan to split the course into two versions: one for STEM majors and the other for business majors. Throughout their course development, they will track the writing process and note their sources of data and information so that educators based in other cities may use these resources as a model to create similar classes at their own institutions.

Roosevelt University’s press office recently published a description of Evins’ and Gonzalez’s planned course. To read the release, please click here, and be sure to follow Engaging Mathematics on Twitter @MathEngaging for updates on our other partners.

Article originally published June 17, 2014.

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