Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Megumi Asada “Teaching logic for social justice: Connecting advanced mathematics and logic to an abolitionist perspective”

Mathematics and mathematics education are implicated in broader societal inequities. These inequities can manifest in racialized and gendered classroom experiences and are perpetuated by some of the very practices students are encouraged to employ. While some scholarship in the K-12 context describes possibilities for the use of mathematics toward social justice, this area has been relatively unexplored within undergraduate mathematics education. It is even unclear the extent to which the strategies from K-12 extend to the undergraduate context. This dissertation aims to develop, and test the viability of, a learning trajectory for how students can use competencies from proof-based mathematics to support their sensemaking about prisons and abolition. The study will consist of two cycles of constructivist teaching experiments with pairs of students, in which they will practice identifying and relaxing assumptions in a geometric context and apply these practices to understanding prisons and abolition. Through the design process and enactment, I will develop an instructional theory that describes the possibilities and limitations for bringing sociopolitical topics into undergraduate mathematics.

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