Eric Gutstein
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their findings both orally and in writing, and developed their mathematical and personal confidence. Their mathematical sophistication and maturity varied, but all succeeded on conventional measures and most graduated into magnet, collegeprep high schools. MiC was the primary vehicle that helped them develop mathematical power, with the real-world projects also playing a role. Through their practice of reading the world with mathematics, the students began to change how they felt about mathematics. Although not all loved math, virtually all understood that mathematics was a tool not only to solve both realistic and fanciful, sometimes enjoyable, problems in books, but it could also be used to dissect society and understand inequality. For the most part, they believed themselves capable of using mathematics to better understand social inequities because that was their experience for almost 2 years. That is, they learned what they practiced, and immersed in a classroom culture where mathematics played this role, these students took on a different belief system about the nature of mathematics. This transformation was a beginning, like learning to read the world, and it is hard to know whether or how it will develop over time. MiC and the real-world projects played mutually supportive roles and had strong interconnections. To help the students develop sociopolitical consciousness, I asked them to use mathematics on real-world, justice-oriented projects that complemented but went beyond MiC’s real-life, but usually nonrelevant situations. I had to work with them to create a classroom culture that went beyond the mathematics and normalized taboo topics, to which MiC’s promotion of multiple viewpoints and critical perspectives contributed. I needed to connect and make coherent the two curricular components, and although there certainly were areas in which I could have improved, my pedagogy was generally consistent, and I was able to specifically link some of the important mathematical content areas. Finally, and possibly most important, I came to understand that in the real world there are some implicit and perhaps inevitable tradeoffs between developing mathematical power and helping students learn to read the world with mathematics—and how to possibly reduce these by being conscious of, and explicit to students about, the various tradeoffs. Of the various conditions that contributed to my students’ growth, I believe that the primary one was the way they and I cocreated a classroom environment in which they discussed meaningful and important issues of justice and equity (Gutstein, 2002b). The impetus was mine, but each student walked into the classroom with a powerful sense of justice stemming from her or his life experiences as a member of a marginalized community subject to immigration raids; police harassment; lowpaying, dead-end, exhausting jobs; and various other forms of race, social-class, and language-status discrimination (Gutstein, 2002a). This sense of justice, though at times mitigated by aspirations of an immigrant community to “make it” in a land of hoped-for opportunity (Ogbu, 1987), became a starting point for normalizing taboo topics and for the real-world projects. Issues my students cared about—from the conditions of immigrant farm laborers to SAT scores to wealth inequality to unfairness in advertising—were ultimately meaningful because of their sense of