Jr Roland Clarence Lucas

Restructuring Math Learning for African American Students Jr Roland Clarence Lucas

Worldwide technological capacity is growing exponentially, and in doing so it increases human data search, processing, and sharing capacities. Transnational businesses with local reach are employing leading edge technology tools ever more and are increasingly requiring that their workforce--even low-skilled workers--have competencies for using them. Students can hardly keep up with this exponential growth of data processing speed and knowledge production. I've reached the awareness years ago, that public schools in urban areas fall far short overall in preparing youth to stay abreast of these demands, due in large part to outdated teaching methods and insufficient resources. One indicator that supports this assessment is the ongoing high dropout rate of African American and Latino students in public high schools of which educators and educational leaders are aware. One means of helping students to adapt to an increasingly technologically demanding market place, is to use interactive technologies infused with the curriculum. Students attending urban public schools, as with most youth today, have already immersed themselves in various new technologies during their activities outside of formal school settings as with social networking through Twitter and Facebook. Leveraging this social and knowledge capital in more formal educational public school settings is one means of enhancing their academic learning experiences and narrowing the achievement gaps they face. This study focused on what dialogue and learning occurred in a Newark public school math class while students were in a culturally-empowering learning space that utilized advanced interactive technologies, coupled with liberating ideologies embedded in the curriculum. The math activities were contextualized within and linked to the broader communities students come from, rather than abstracted from their communities. The students accessed and managed available sociocultural and technological resources to construct meaning and knowledge applicable to their collective self-identified community issues and motives. It has my been experience throughout the course of this study that such an environment produces educational experiences for minority students that are transformative of existing constraining structures in public schools, affording agency for disadvantaged groups. This result can in turn close the knowledge and achievement gaps they face.