Contributor: Graeme Austin (Luton Sixth Form College)
The first face-to-face Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM) Conference since BCME ’19 gave us an opportunity to share and discuss our thinking about social justice in Maths teaching. Pete Wright and Graeme Austin ran a workshop on the first day of the event where Pete presented the network’s activities and Graeme gave attendees a taste of one of the discovery worksheets that a working group was focusing on in 2022.
Attendees were treated like students and experienced first-hand the change in hierarchy and expectations of student agency that ‘discovering’ Maths for themselves brought to them, in contrast to a more traditional explain-then-practice structure.
In fact, the lack of advance information meant some attendees asked for the facilitator-teacher to provide an explanation of the connection between their algebra work (in finding KS5 equations of motion) and social justice. Perhaps the best assessment of the workshop is that we ran out of time for our discussions and questions. Some attendees also continued the dialogue the following day.
The Teaching Maths for Social Justice Network 