People use math as a weapon: critical mathematics consciousness in the time of COVID-19

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased attention to the critical mathematical literacy of citizens in the United States and around the world. A statistically and mathematically literate society is crucial for ensuring that citizens are able to sift through political rhetoric to maintain life-saving procedures such as social distancing and other infection dampening efforts. Additionally, recent civil unrest due to the disproportionate killings of Black men by police provokes investigation into the public’s mathematical literacy. In this paper, we investigate adolescent students’ critical mathematics consciousness and mathematics literacy as they reason through two interview tasks on the coronavirus and police shooting data. Drawing on Frankenstein’s program of Critical Mathematics Education, we introduce an analytic framework for documenting the critical mathematics consciousness of adolescent students. We interviewed fifteen 14- to 16-year-old students as they solved five tasks designed to elicit their critical and ethical mathematical awareness. Our findings indicate that students exhibit very little critical mathematics consciousness in the context of the police problem but show awareness that data can be presented in ways that manipulate the public’s emotions in the coronavirus problem. We conclude the paper with a discussion of implications for designing future instruction to support students’ growth in critical mathematics consciousness.