2024 Mathematics Education Colloquium March 6th
Please join us at the upcoming Mathematics Education Colloquium, on Wednesday, March
6, 2024 from 3:30 - 5:00 pm on Zoom. Dr. Kari Kokka, Associate Professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will be presenting "I don’t want there to be any kind of shame or sense of ‘less than.’" Affective Pedagogical
Goals for Social Justice Mathematics.
Please see the zoom link and passcode in the Colloquium flyer posted on our Mathematics Education Colloquium page.
Abstract: Educators teaching mathematics for social justice may attend to students’ affective needs, which may need to be catered to students’ positionalities and school or home contexts. For instance, some mathematics teachers may use healing- and trauma-informed practices to ensure care for students’ emotions when investigating injustices that directly impact students’ lives (e.g., food or housing insecurity, racial profiling, transphobia, bias in medical care, and so forth). However, students of relatively privileged backgrounds may not understand the urgency to take action to address injustices in the community and the world. Therefore, teachers may aim to foster emotional engagement, by using simulations for instance, to build students’ critical civic empathy (Mirra, 2018). In this talk, Dr. Kokka will share about her work with affective pedagogical goals for social justice mathematics (Kokka, 2022). She will discuss emergent findings from her two-year collaboration with one public charter high school’s mathematics department in the Eastern United States. And she will describe her current research and professional development partnership with three SJM coaches and 13 mathematics teachers across the United States. She will conclude with reflections and share her hopes and dreams for future projects.
Bio: Dr. Kari Kokka (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education in the
Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She studies
social justice mathematics, mathematics teacher activism, and critical consciousness
development of mathematics teachers. Her current research projects are funded by the
National Science Foundation and Spencer Foundation. Before her position at UNLV, she
was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Pittsburgh
(2017-2022), mathematics teacher activist and instructional coach at Vanguard High
School, a Title I public school in New York City (2001-2011), and a mathematics teacher
and diving coach at Berkeley High School (1999-2000). Dr. Kokka completed her doctorate
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (2017), principal certification with the
NYC Leadership Academy (2011), and M.A. in Education (2001) and B.S. in Mechanical
Engineering (1999) at Stanford University. She is a proud product of East San Jose,
CA, K-12 public schools. She is also co-host of the Critical Math Drop podcast. You can learn more about her work at www.karikokka.com, and she can be reached at kari.kokka@unlv.edu.
The Program in Mathematics Education sponsors this event.
