1 Building on Community Knowledge: An Avenue to Equity in Mathematics Education

This paper presents my personal reflection on over more than a decade of work in mathematics education in low-income, mostly Latino communities in Tucson. My research is driven by an equity agenda that capitalizes on building on the students ’ and their families’ knowledge and experiences as resources for schooling. What are the implications for the mathematical education of these children, if we take their experiences and backgrounds as resources for learning in the classroom? This paper addresses this question by paying special attention to the challenges in the pedagogical transformation of household knowledge into mathematical knowledge for the classroom. These challenges are related in part to teachers’, students ’ and our own beliefs about what counts as mathematics. Most of my focus in this paper is on a critical reflection on our own work as we tried to link school mathematics with everyday experiences. I will use examples from the different modules / teaching innovations we carried out during the years to examine two aspects of our work: a. Developing teaching innovations in mathematics that build on cultural aspects of the students ’ community/ies (e.g.. how do our values about what we consider to be mathematics influence the curriculum development? (Civil & Andrade, 2002)). b. Implementing such innovations with an eye on the mathematics (e.g., what resources and support mechanisms are needed for teachers to successfully carry out the implementation?)