Engaging Mathematics Leads Hands-On Session and Delivers Plenary Address during 15th Annual SSI

During the 15th Annual SENCER Summer Institute held last week at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the Engaging Mathematics initiative led a hands-on session in which participants tried out lessons and curricular units that faculty from the Engaging Math project have developed, all of which illustrate how to connect important topics in mathematics to a variety of civic issues. We are pleased to share these lessons and associated materials here on our project website, so that even if you weren’t able to join us in Worcester, you will still be able to access and use the Engaging Mathematics lessons in your own classroom, with your own students.

The lessons cover civic topics in environmental science, health, social justice, and sustainability, and are applicable to statistics, college algebra, pre-calculus, calculus, and mathematics for liberal arts courses. For an outline of the agenda of the hands-on session, links to lessons and materials covered by session presenters, and links to our Engaging Mathematics Advisory Board member Victor Donnay’s plenary slides, references, and handouts, please see the document below:

Download (PDF, 101KB)

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.