This paper describes data from the Community Mapping Project (CMP), a set of activities within a summer seminar for high school students. CMP was designed based on the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy to create conditions where students themselves would recognize the relevance of statistics in identifying and describing inequities that face their communities. Using mixed methods we analyzed pre- and post assessments, final projects and process data from video case studies to begin to understand how this learning was organized for the 21 twelfth graders participating in this project. Our qualitative analysis revealed several tensions that emerged between the social justice goals and statistical goals and how those tensions mediated learning. The article may help inform both teachers who wish to rethink their statistics pedagogy, and the designers of culturally relevant curricula.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education