“I Always Thought Math Was Just Numbers”: Developing Mathematics Teaching Through Integration of Multicultural Children’s Literature and Social Justice

Abstract

This qualitative study examines how teacher candidates in one mathematics methods course negotiated curriculum integration of mathematics with social justice through the use of multicultural children’s literature. Drawing on multiple sources of data including teacher candidate selection process of the literature, lesson plans artifacts, and reflection essays, this study explores how teacher candidates balanced competing learning goals when developing an integrated unit. The findings from this study reveal that while this process of planning was challenging for many teacher candidates, the results show that when mathematics is grounded in a culturally relevant context, students are more engaged and are able to connect mathematical learning to real-world and useful meaningful applications in their lived experiences. Additionally, teacher candidates were able to develop a broader conception of mathematics teaching, underscoring the value that a focus on social justice can have not just on student learning but on teacher professional development.

1. Introduction

Extant research in mathematics education has shifted to prioritizing culturally responsive (Abdulrahim & Orosco, 2020; Gay, 2009; Greer, 2009) culturally relevant (Gutstein et al., 1997; Tate, 1995), culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012; Hunter et al., 2018), and social justice (Bartell et al., 2022; Bartell, 2013; Berry et al., 2020; Conway et al., 2022; Gutstein, 2003, 2012; Koestler et al., 2022; Kokka, 2022)-focused mathematics instruction to expand the mathematical learning opportunities available to students that have been historically excluded. As students continue to experience more and more unrest in the world, there is a need to consider the role of mathematics teachers in supporting the development of students’ sociopolitical understanding across contents (Garcia et al., 2022) and particularly through mathematics learning (Gutiérrez, 2017) in order to work towards social justice.

Additionally, many studies emphasize the importance of maintaining robust mathematical learning opportunities alongside language development and suggest that engaging in rich tasks can actually enhance language proficiency for emergent bilingual students (de Araujo et al., 2018; Poza, 2019). Yet, for many students, the learning opportunities often depend on what language mathematics is taught and assessed in, and educators often lack support in planning mathematical lessons that support language development, particularly with the use of the target language of instruction (Chávez & Montufar-Soria, 2023).

Through curriculum integration of mathematics with social justice, using multicultural children’s literature, teachers can provide relevant context for students to use mathematics to engage in critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) and make sense of the world while providing opportunities for them to demonstrate their learning using their full linguistic repertoires through the embedding of language development. When mathematics content and literacy practices are attended to simultaneously, students can be provided opportunities to develop productive mathematical disposition, a positive mathematical identity, and linguistic pride. Across the educational field, the study of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) has led to instruction that centers learning opportunities for students to understand the world in context with their own communities and experiences in mind across disciplinary contents. Drawing on Freire’s (1970) literacy circles, Yang (2009) followed “critical consumption and critical production of texts” (p. 101) of mathematical texts in a youth participatory action research project. As part of that work, students read a diverse set of texts ranging from Pythagoras and Irrational Numbers to Tupac Conspiracy Theories (p. 107) as a means to research social issues in their neighborhoods. Yet integration such as this example is uncommon and atypical. While some research has looked at the integration of curriculum (Wall & Leckie, 2017), mathematics, and social justice (Bartell, 2013), little research has looked at the integration of mathematics with critical literacy and social justice using multicultural children’s literature.

Berry et al. (2020) frame social justice as “considering the contributions of each and every person, in society [in relation to] access, participation, empowerment and human rights” (p. 18), and further consider teaching math for social justice as “freedom from oppression through mathematical literacy, and freedom to act upon and impact the world through personal and social transformation” (p. 22). Their definition combined with the social justice standards (Learning for Justice, 2022), that support the development of students’ engagement with “anti-bias, multicultural, and social justice issues” (p. 2) through engagement with four domains of Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action, inform how this study conceptualizes the integration of social justice into mathematics lessons. Social justice mathematics thus becomes a pedagogical approach in which teachers center students’ mathematical learning towards access to content, participation with content, and empowerment through content (Berry et al., 2020; Gutstein, 2012), as well as the development of students’ sociopolitical understanding through critical mathematics (Gutiérrez, 2017). This framing results in mathematics lessons that do not just develop students to succeed in traditional mathematics learning but also provide opportunities for students to see mathematics as a tool that can support them to make connections with their social and cultural contexts.

Through qualitative thematic analysis of artifacts created by teachers in a mathematics methods course, this research sought to address this gap. Drawing on multiple sources of data that included book selections, lesson plans, and reflective essays, this study highlights how teachers balance multiple learning goals (mathematics, literacy, and social justice) in integrated units centering multicultural children’s literature by answering the following research question: How did teacher candidates negotiate curriculum integration of mathematics with social justice using multicultural children’s literature when planning and implementing lessons?

In the next section, I provide a brief overview of the literature grounding this study and the conceptual framing and methodological approaches, followed by a presentation of the findings and implications of this research.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Social Justice Mathematics

Gutstein (2012) outlines a framework for teaching mathematics for social justice, with social justice and mathematics goals that included “reading and writing the world with mathematics” (p. 23) drawing on Freire’s (1970) notion to support students’ development of critical consciousness and education as a “practice of freedom” (p. 81). In his work, students have used mathematics as a tool to address social inequity issues, such as connections between racism and (a lack of) affordable housing (Gutstein, 2007). His work highlights the use of discourse and essay writing that can connect students to mathematics learning, particularly for Latine and emergent bilingual students (Gutstein et al., 1997). In the series of books of Mathematics Lessons To Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice, Berry et al. (2020) provide social justice lessons that are applicable to high school classrooms, Conway et al. (2022) focus on lessons for middle school classrooms, Bartell et al. (2022) focus on lessons for upper elementary classrooms, and Koestler et al. (2022) focus on lessons for early elementary classrooms. These lessons show how students can apply mathematics as a tool to make sense of the world around them, while providing tangible resources for teachers to implement in their classrooms.

Bartell (2013) focused on the work of one course designed to support teachers when teaching social justice. As part of that process, secondary mathematics teachers in her course developed an understanding of mathematics for social justice through immersion in the literature, followed by lesson studies that incorporated social justice goals. Bartell found that teachers reported tensions around balancing both mathematics and social justice goals, made visible by teachers’ focus on social justice in the planning stages, and a disconnect between mathematics and social justice in implementation, with mathematics often overpowering social justice. In her work, Kokka (2022) extends Gutstein’s (2012) goals of “reading and writing the world” to include a third goal of social justice mathematics—affective pedagogy—and pushes educators to further consider attending to the emotions, attitudes, and beliefs that students’ draw on and develop when engaging mathematics to address social issues.

2.2. Using Children’s Literature to Support Mathematical Learning

Many studies have looked at the use of children’s literature to help teach mathematics (Edelman et al., 2019; Flevares & Schiff, 2014; Harding et al., 2017). In a review of the literature, Edelman et al. (2019) highlight studies focused on student achievement, motivation, engagement, and mathematical discourse, as well as studies focused on teacher preparation and teacher pedagogy. Of note, they found that across the studies between 1991 and 2016 focused on students, one study was able to determine that using children’s books increased students’ abilities to use mathematical vocabulary and communicate (Capraro & Capraro, 2006); several other studies drew on the illustrations in picture books to elicit mathematical thinking (Anderson & Anderson, 1995; Anderson et al., 2004, 2005) and others found that the use of children’s literature resulted in more positive mathematical engagement for students (Hong, 1996; Jennings et al., 1992; Castle & Needham, 2007). However, many studies were not able to quantify their results or found mixed statistical significance (Edelman et al., 2019).

For studies focused on teacher preparation and teacher pedagogy, research has focused on how books are integrated into professional development or how teachers evaluate and rationalize the use of children’s books in service of mathematical learning (Edelman et al., 2019; Flevares & Schiff, 2014). Cotti and Schiro (2004) looked at teachers’ ideological positions and how those shaped their use of children’s literature to engage students, while a different study focused on pre-service teachers’ beliefs (Wilburne & Napoli, 2008). When looking at how books are selected for mathematical learning, some studies have focused on selecting children’s books based on their mathematical robustness and cultural relevance (Leonard et al., 2014), and others have focused on the learning purposes of “furthering math knowledge, monitoring or scaffolding” (Harding et al., 2017, p. 400). Some work has begun to consider the integration of translanguaging children’s literature to support students to bridge content and language through interdisciplinary centers in dual language classrooms (Chavez & Coronado, 2025).

These studies highlight the varied uses and learning opportunities of using children’s literature in teaching mathematics, yet few studies have considered how multicultural and justice-centered literature can support teaching social justice mathematics.

2.3. Multicultural Children’s Literature

Multicultural children’s literature encompasses literature about diverse communities and social groups (Casto, 2020; Gopalkrishnan, 2011) and “validates all sociocultural experiences including those occurring because of language, race, gender, class, ethnicity, and ability” (Gopalkrishnan, 2011, p. 29). This definition draws on the roots of multiculturalism and how multicultural education grew out of the civil rights movement (Banks, 2004), highlighting a focus on not just presenting diverse characters and experiences but validating their lived experiences to transform social hierarchies in order to achieve social justice.

In a review of the literature that looked at how multicultural literature was used in teacher preparation programs, Casto (2020) found that across 24 studies, multicultural literature was used to read and respond to the texts with coursework, incorporated into clinical practice and service learning projects, and understanding the authorship of multicultural children’s literature. Lawrence et al. (2017) asked teachers to incorporate multicultural literature into their capstone projects within their clinical placements. Their study highlights the work of two teachers who developed lessons aligned to the literacy standards and guided questioning to measure reading comprehension, which shows that multicultural literature helped students providing more authentic connections to learning; however, more work is needed to support teachers in developing questions that will guide students towards more critical thinking. In her work within elementary students, Osorio (2018) drew on multicultural children’s literature as a tool for working with second grade bilingual students and found that using multicultural literature can “promote or develop an appreciation for diversity, honor students’ voices, connect to students’ rich linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and promote critical consciousness” (p. 47). These studies highlight the minimal yet ongoing work of incorporating multicultural children’s literature into the work of pre-service and in-service teachers. However, it is important to note that like research on curriculum integration, there is limited research on the use of multicultural children’s literature to support mathematical learning.

3. Curriculum Integration as a Framework

This study draws on curriculum integration as a framework for connecting mathematics with social justice through the use of multicultural children’s literature, thus further integrating disciplinary literacy practices. There is contention of what counts as curriculum integration, given the conflation with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary curriculum research (Wall & Leckie, 2017), and even in the field, there are multiple interpretations of what constitutes curriculum integration (Beane, 1997). Researchers of curriculum integration note that a key difference between the two is that curriculum integration centers around themes and units that support students to think critically about what they are learning to act on the world around them, whereas interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary curriculum centers on specific disciplinary content (Wall & Leckie, 2017). Educators may assume that integration should constitute the integration of multiple disciplines, yet most studies have focused on integrating two to three content areas since integration does not constitute the integration of all contents (Wall & Leckie, 2017). Most of the research on curriculum integration has focused on the integration of language arts with either social studies (Field et al., 2011; Wall & Leckie, 2017), music (Lowe, 2002), or the arts (Krug & Cohen-Evron, 2000), with other studies focused on the integration of science and mathematics (Berlin & Lee, 2005).

Beane (1997) highlights four major themes of curriculum integration: integration of experiences, social integration, integration of knowledge, and integration as curriculum design. In integration of experiences and social contexts, teachers draw on students’ experiences and diverse cultural perspectives to facilitate understanding and engagement. In integration of knowledge, teachers incorporate relevant content area concepts, building on students’ experiences and diverse perspectives. Lastly, in integration as curriculum design, teachers utilize project-based learning as a form of engagement. In outlining these four themes, Bene highlights that curriculum integration goes beyond just integrating disciplinary contents, as is conducted in interdisciplinary curriculum, and delineates that curriculum integration centers around “the curriculum of life itself…so as to deepen and broaden our understanding of ourselves and our world” (p. 18).

Thus, curriculum integration has the potential to be a more relevant, meaningful, and authentic learning approach that teachers can leverage in their classrooms (Beane, 1997). Through curriculum integration, teachers are able to connect multiple subject areas to create a more cohesive curriculum to increase students’ understanding of themselves and society (Beane, 1997; Wall & Leckie, 2017). Indeed, proponents of curriculum integration emphasize the purpose of integration to be an opportunity for students to focus on applying learning to real-world issues, enabling students to think critically to “read and write” the world around them (Beane, 1997).

4. Methods

4.1. Context of Study

This study was conducted in graduate elementary mathematics methods courses at a mid-size public university in Central California. The methods course is offered to multiple-subject (TK-8) teacher candidates in their initial phase of a three-semester teacher credential program. The program caters to a diverse population of undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students that reflect the overall demographics of the university. The university is designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) with a graduate Latine enrollment of 45.6% graduate and 55.4% undergraduate students. The university is also designated as an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving Institution (AANAPISI) with an enrollment of 9.5% graduate and 12.6% undergraduate students. The university also serves 27% graduate and 17.8% undergraduate white students, and 2.4% graduate and 2.7% undergraduate Black students.

As a mathematics methods instructor in the teacher preparation program, I worked with 69 teacher candidates in two teaching residency programs across three methods courses. Teacher candidates in these courses served diverse students across two school districts in the region that reflect the demographic of the university enrollment. In these courses, teacher candidates were challenged to unlearn deficit framings of what learning and performing mathematics is believed to be and relearn how to engage in collaborative mathematical thinking to view mathematics as an exploration of ideas (Louie et al., 2021). Additionally, teacher candidates are exposed to social justice and interdisciplinary approaches for mathematics teaching. In this paper, I report on the work of teacher candidates tasked with integrating mathematics with social justice standards using multicultural children’s literature, attending to language development, literacy practices, and social justice standards through the development of justice-centered units over one semester.

4.2. Data Sources

All of the data utilized for this study were collected over the course of one 16-week semester across three sections of a mathematics methods course geared towards teacher candidates in a multiple-subject credential program. Data for this study includes all of the planning documents submitted—book selection, individual lesson plans and unit plans, and reflections. Teacher candidates were tasked with completing their units through participation in a four-part cycle. First, candidates were tasked with selecting a book based on how the book attended to identity, culture, and language. Candidates were provided a curated list of culturally relevant translanguaging literature, but several selected their own texts from their own library. As part of the book selection process, candidates had to identify mathematical content and practice standards, literacy standards, language development standards, and social justice standards (Learning for Justice, 2022) that could be addressed with the book they selected.

Table 1. Example questions guiding book selection.

Category	Guiding Question
Culturally Relevant and Linguistically Responsive	What activities and discussions can you create that will afford the learners the opportunity to look inwards at their uniqueness of thought and at how they see/conceptualize the topics in their lived experiences?
Literacy Practices	How will the book allow for students to engage language through verbal and written tasks?
Mathematics	How can the book be used to solve or highlight a social justice issue through mathematics?

highlights some examples of the questions teacher candidates answered through the book selection process.

Once their books were selected, candidates within each group had to develop an individual lesson plan including a formative assessment component centered around a multidimensional mathematical task aligned to the book and standards they had selected. These lessons were then implemented in their respective clinical placement classrooms and candidates analyzed student work and engagement throughout the lesson. Candidates also reflected on how their individual lessons aligned within the broader unit and planned for unit closure. Lastly, candidates submitted a reflection paper on the process of implementing their lessons and planning the full unit.

4.3. Analytic Approach

So as to not influence teacher decision-making when tasked with integrating mathematics with children’s multicultural literature while attending to social justice, I intentionally analyzed the original submissions of documents. That is, the analysis conducted for this paper was completed on original submissions, and did not include changes made to book selection, lesson plans, or unit plans after having provided feedback to teacher candidates. Thus, each data source was analyzed separately for the corpus of data. An additional final round of analysis looked at the aesthetic whole (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) of two journeys for teacher candidates engaging in the process.

Through thematic analysis of the data, (Clarke & Braun, 2017) I began with analyzing the candidates’ book selection, noting characteristics of books candidates selected for their justice-centered unit, the big ideas students planned to address as part of their unit, and the multiple standards identified with particular attention to what social justice standard domains teachers selected for their units given that candidates were asked to reflect on how their selected book could be used to solve or highlight a social justice issue through mathematics. I then analyzed the individual lesson plans submitted, with attention to how the mathematics tasks and assessment attended to social justice learning goals using the social justice anchor standards (Learning for Justice, 2022) as a framework for coding, and how candidates incorporated language development such as whole class discussions, partner talk, or written explanations of student thinking as some examples. In the third round, I analyzed the full unit plans with multiple lesson alignment, unit closure, and analysis of student work. In this round of analysis, I continued to look for the same aspects as previous rounds and expanded to consider additional aspects such as cohesion and complexity of tasks across the unit, and how the unit as a whole addressed the social justice goals set forth from initial book selection. Lastly, I analyzed the individual reflections submitted by candidates, noting shifts in beliefs and practice from initial book selection to post-implementation, and the success of integrating mathematics with social justice through the use of multicultural children’s literature. This process allowed me to note trends in candidates’ initial exploration of social justice through book selection and lesson planning and any shifts in understanding in their implementations and reflections.

Each round further allowed me to note any emerging themes and codes (Charmaz, 2015) from the data that was subsequently used in ongoing analysis. After the fourth round of analysis, I was able to identify three major themes that included shifts in understanding and tensions with planning and implementing a mathematics lesson through this integrated and interdisciplinary process. The first theme that emerged was the use of multicultural children’s literature books as an entry point into social justice mathematics resulting in varied complexity of integration that teacher candidates enacted. The second theme highlights the shifts in understanding that teacher candidates experienced as they oriented themselves and worked towards integrating the social justice standards into mathematics teaching. Lastly, the third theme unearthed the tensions that teacher candidates navigated throughout the process of planning and implementation. Drawing on portraiture methodology (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), I then returned to the corpus of data to frame an aesthetic whole of two teacher candidate journeys. In particular, this study draws on portraiture to paint portraits of the journey of the participants, rather than the participants themselves. That is, the portraits presented here are not meant to portray two individual teacher candidates, rather the portraits are representative of two journeys that multiple teacher candidates were navigating throughout the process. To do so, I draw on the context of my own experience working with the teacher candidates to imagine the possibilities of integrated and interdisciplinary social justice mathematics that shaped the journeys they experienced through the process of planning and implementation. Furthermore, I consider multiple relationships that the teacher candidates navigated through this process, including the relationships between them and myself as their instructor, their individual relationships with mathematics both as learners and as future educators, and their relationships with their students that were visible in their analysis of students’ work and their individual reflections. This process allowed me to be able to give voice to their journeys, shaped by my own journey as their methods instructor.

4.4. Researcher Positionality

As the researcher in this study, I played a major role in the process of planning, designing, and implementation of the assignments that teacher candidates completed for this study. As a Chicanx woman of color raised in predominantly Latine borderlands of South Texas, I attended schools in which many of my mathematics teachers did not look like me or center my gender, cultural, or linguistic backgrounds. While I experienced success in mathematics academically, I was never encouraged or supported to consider how mathematics could be a resource to make sense of, critique, and work towards improving the injustices that I and many others in my community experienced. As a secondary mathematics teacher that entered teaching with a framework of mathematics as a “pure” and apolitical discipline, I have journeyed to reframe my own perspectives around what it means for teachers to position students as learners of and doers of mathematics where mathematics is a tool for reading and writing the world. My experiences shape who I am as a critical scholar, educator, and participant in society. Additionally, as the instructor for the course, I shaped candidates’ understanding of culturally relevant and social justice mathematics instruction through the assigned course readings and course activities that informed teacher candidates’ approaches. While this work undoubtedly provided some frameworks for them, several teacher candidates sought additional support in planning and implementing their lessons. To mitigate concerns around my input in the data, I made every attempt to frame my support through guiding questions instead of providing explicit suggestions.

In the next sections, I first present findings from the analysis of the collective units that speak to the first finding of how the multicultural children’s literature books functioned as an entry point into social justice mathematics and the level and complexity of integration that teacher candidates enacted. I then present the portraits of two journeys that teacher candidates navigated. The first journey speaks to the second finding of the shifts in understanding that teacher candidates experienced as they oriented themselves and worked towards integrating the social justice standards into mathematics teaching. The second journey speaks to the last finding of the tensions that teacher candidates navigated throughout the process of planning and implementation.

5. Results

5.1. Multicultural Children’s Literature as a Gateway to Social Justice Mathematics

I wanted to understand how teachers balanced and made sense of a book’s content to help integrate social justice standards into mathematics teaching and found that the practice of beginning with a multicultural children’s book to design a mathematics lesson led to the book serving as an entry point to engaging social justice mathematics. All candidates considered the social justice standards when selecting a book; the majority of candidates focused primarily on standards pertaining to Identity and Diversity—out of the 24 units, 15 of the units incorporated social justice standards in the Identity domain, 12 in the Diversity domain, five in Justice domain, and only one in the Action domain. Thus, at the initial stage where teacher candidates were selecting books to anchor their units, teacher candidates were able to make connections across the four domains of the social justice standards. Roughly half of the units addressed multiple social justice standards while 12 units focused on a single domain—7 focused on Identity and 5 focused on Diversity. For most candidates, the books were opportunities for them to support their students to see themselves reflected in the context of learning or be exposed to different cultures and engage multiple languages. The majority of candidates reflected on the importance of addressing Identity and Diversity standards in connection to the students they were serving. For example, one candidate in a TK classroom stated:

Math [became] more meaningful as students [connected] it to their daily lives. The book we read connected to ‘Dia de Los Muertos’ which is celebrated in some of their homes and in our kindergarten class students learned about Dia de Los Muertos and created an altar for the deceased. The book [also] included Spanish words such as Señor Calavera, uno, dos, etc., and most of the students come from bilingual homes.

[TC50, Reflection]

Similarly to this candidate, many others saw the book as an opportunity to draw students into mathematical learning through the contextual anchoring of social justice connections, in particular attending to identity and diversity, that the multicultural children’s books provided.

However, out of the 24 units, only 9 units extended the use of the social justice standards and were able to explicitly address them through their mathematical activities, highlighting that while teachers were able to see social justice connections when engaging the process of book selection, many struggled with how to balance social justice goals when explicitly thinking about mathematics learning. In particular, teacher candidates noted that a challenge to planning this way came from having never been exposed to social justice mathematics. One candidate noted:

This class was my introduction to justice centered practices and this was my first attempt at co-planning a justice centered unit. I really enjoyed the challenge of focusing on justice centered lessons and instruction, as well as incorporating real-world applications to the content. I think, for the first time, I truly considered the importance of providing access to culturally diverse content.

[TC8, Reflection]

Again, we see how connecting the book to a mathematics task served as an entry point for candidates to recognize the importance of cultural relevance in mathematics learning, and how the books provided opportunities for real-world application to the mathematics content that their students were learning. Indeed, for many of the candidates, this challenge was worth the effort, and they found student engagement and their own personal learning to be some of the most rewarding aspects of planning this way. Overall, teacher candidates reported that planning integrated justice-centered units in this way made visible the opportunities to make culturally relevant connections to learning mathematics.

Complexity of Tasks and Integration

Nine units were explicit in addressing social justice standards in their mathematics lessons and ranged in the complexity of how they integrated these aspects into their mathematics lessons. Below, I share two of these units that represent teacher candidates’ attempts to address mathematical concepts through rich tasks that integrated their selected social justice standards anchored by their selected multicultural children’s literature book (see

Table 2. Overview of units fully integrating social justice standards into mathematics lessons.

Unit/Book(s)	What Can You Do with a Paleta?	Land of the Cranes/A Seed in the Sun
Grade Level	TK	7th
Social Justice Standards	ID.K-2.1: I know and like who I am and can talk about my family and myself and name some of my group identities. DI.K-2.6: I like being around people who are like me and different from me, and I can be friendly to everyone.	DI.6-8.9: I know I am connected to other people and can relate to them even when we are different or when we disagree. JU.6-8.12: I can recognize and describe unfairness and injustice in many forms including attitudes, speech, behaviors, practices and laws.
Lesson 1 Overview	Students will classify shape popsicles into their respective shape category and by their size into further respective groups (i.e., small, medium, large) using knowledge of shape attributes.	After reading the poem, “We Planted Roses Too,” students will create their own garden with different plants/trees and use their understanding of fractions to determine and maximize a play area.
Lesson 2 Overview	Students will make selections of paletas for each of their family members. Students will then recall different counting strategies to determine how many paletas they selected and observe differences and similarities in the makeup of family units and compare paleta quantities to determine which family has more, less, or an equal number of family members.	After reading the poem, “To School,” students will use addition and subtraction of decimals to determine the best route to school taking into consideration choice and real-life constraints of time and money.
Lesson 3 Overview	Students will be able to classify their favorite paleta into a group by color, create a whole group vertical bar graph of paletas, compare amounts (more/less), and interpret the graphical representation.	After reading the poem, “Dolores Speaks,” students will calculate percentage increases in wages, research and estimate a livable wage based on local cost of living factors, and engage in collaborative discussions to analyze the implications of fair wages and economic justice in their community.

for overview of units).

One of the units planned by a group of candidates centered around the children’s book What Can You Do with a Paleta? by Tafolla (2009) within a Transitional Kindergarten context. This unit consisted of three implemented lessons that cohesively addressed multiple standards while addressing an overarching focus on self-identity and belonging within communities. The progression of these lessons provided opportunities for students to engage in meaning making through mathematical thinking. Teacher candidates introduced this unit to their students by engaging in a Notice and Wonder provocation of a paleta cart similar to the cart presented in the book before engaging in a read aloud with students. During the read aloud, students engaged in a think–pair–share to support language development and text-to-self connections. In the first lesson, students engaged in labeling, sorting, and comparing different shaped paletas, and discussed individual choice, identifying individual preferences on shape and size. In the second lesson, students engaged in comparing quantities to determine more, less, or equal and one-to-one correspondence in selecting paletas for the different members in their families. In the third lesson, students selected paletas for themselves and then sorted and created a classroom graph to then interpret the data, comparing quantities and discussing observations around collective and individual choice. Across these three lessons, teachers maintained a throughline of mathematical concepts of sorting, comparisons (more/less) and counting (one-to-one correspondence), provided opportunities for students to express and listen to ideas of others through conversations, and allowed for students to develop positive social identities by promoting individual pride without denying the value of others (ID.K-2.1), allowing students to gain comfort with others that are similar and different from themselves (DI.K-2.6), attending to their social justice standards. As can be seen across the three lessons, this unit was successful in addressing social justice standards related to Identity and Diversity, which were the two mostly incorporated domain standards.

A different unit, planned by teacher candidates in middle school contexts, extended to address Justice standards, which only 5 out of 24 included in their units. This unit centered around two texts by Aida Salazar (2020, 2022), Land of the Cranes and A Seed in the Sun. In this unit, the candidates implemented three lessons in seventh grade classrooms, incorporating poetry into their lessons. These candidates were intentional in selecting poetry due to the context of what their students were learning in their English language arts classes, and focused on poems connected to immigrant and farmworker communities that a majority of their students identified with, particularly in the Central Valley of California. The unit began with a lesson connected to the poem, “We Planted Roses, Too” in the book the Land of the Cranes. In the poem, the character Betita shares about her father planting a garden for her mother and her and her friend getting to play in parts of the yard. As part of this lesson, students were asked to reflect on the various plants and trees that are mentioned, such as chabacanos (apricots), and their own connections to fruit trees and family gatherings such as those mentioned in the poem. Students were then tasked with designing their own gardens on a 6 × 8 grid, with parameters for how much space was needed for each plant or tree and determining how much of the yard space is dedicated to each plant, tree, and play area using concepts of fractions. Students were further encouraged to explore what plants they may choose to reduce or get rid of to maximize their play areas. This lesson provided opportunities for students to consider aspects of the communities they reside in (farmlands), the cultural experiences of family gatherings, and access to outdoor play spaces. In the second lesson, students engaged in reading the poem, “To School” in which the characters, Concha and her sister, are walking towards school and come across a farmworker protest but continue on their way to school. For this task, students were asked to use their knowledge of addition and subtraction with decimals to determine a path to school based on A/B choices with different outcomes (see Figure 1 as an example).

Students answered questions about the best route to school based on wanting to save time, energy, or money. This lesson extended students’ understanding of the different experiences students have within the community every morning on their way to school. The last lesson in this unit centered around the poem, “Dolores Speaks,” a speech by Dolores Huerta that inspires the character, Concha, to join the 1965 protest for migrant workers’ rights. Students are engaged to consider farm workers’ wages and use knowledge of percents and ratios to determine cost of living, if wages are fair to live comfortably in their own communities, and finally consider how increased wages would increase resources and community wealth. Across these three lessons, students were engaged in rigorous mathematical activity that integrated opportunities for students to continuously consider how they are connected to each other and their communities that are similar or different from those represented in the multiple poems used (DI.6-8.9), while engaging in discussions around differences in access, fairness, and injustice (JU.6-8.12).

In this next section, I highlight the portraits of two journeys that teacher candidates navigated. The first journey highlights the shifts in understanding of addressing social justice issues with mathematics through the integration of multicultural children’s literature and the second journey highlights ongoing tensions that teacher candidates contended with when integrating social justice and literacy while wanting to prioritize mathematics. These journeys draw on the experiences of multiple teacher candidates.

5.2. Portrait One: Elucidating Shifts in Teacher Candidates’ Understanding of Mathematics Teaching

This first portrait highlights the journey of teacher candidates who had not been exposed to social justice standards previously and were unsure of how these standards could be integrated into mathematics with young children. This portrait is intended to provide insights into the ways that teacher candidates took up the challenge of addressing social justice standards with mathematics and demonstrates the shifts in understanding that teacher candidates experienced through this process and how multicultural children’s literature supported that shift.

“A Different Level of Thought and Planning”

For many teacher candidates, this course was an initial introduction to the social justice standards, integrating children’s literature into mathematics, and reframing mathematics as a creative endeavor and not just numbers. One teacher candidate stated, “I always thought that math was just numbers, problems and word problems…I am now able to see through the layers of numbers and can see how math is a great vehicle to pursue equity and social justice” [TC51, Reflection].

Several candidates on this journey were challenged to completely shift their beliefs about not just what counts as mathematics, but how to engage students’ mathematical thinking beyond rote problem solving. The journey for these candidates required them to rise to “a different level of thought and planning” [TC27, Reflection], and like many other candidates, this candidate remarked that “it never occurred to me to also use a storybook as a launchpad for math lessons” [TC27, Reflection]. For this teacher candidate, there was substantial support that was needed and provided through coursework assignments, collaborative learning in class, and course readings. The particular contexts and resources that were shared in the course helped lay a foundation for them to see the possibilities for engaging young children to view mathematics as a tool to make sense of the world around them. This candidate remarked:

I admit that initially, I wondered how this could possibly work with 4-year-olds. It does! They are young, but they are not empty vessels. They have ideas and experiences, and they want to share them. They are naturally curious and want to know about others.

[TC27, Reflection]

This candidate recognized that even though this might be the first time their four-year-old students have been in a classroom, they have previously formed identities and knowledge that they bring with them and these can, and do, become meaningful experiences that students draw on to learn and make connections to mathematics. This shift in understanding allowed for them to believe that all their TK students were able to make sense of data and plan a lesson where:

Students will be able to classify their favorite paleta into a group by color, create a whole group vertical bar graph of paletas, compare amounts (more/less), and interpret the graphical representation, to answer the guiding question: How can a graph represent our preferences?

[TC27, Lesson Plan]

This lesson further allowed for them to see that, through mathematical discussions addressing social justice standards attending to identity and diversity, students were able to see their individuality within the broader class community—“the task prompted discussions about cold treats that we like…how we don’t all like the same things, and that’s part of what makes each person special” [TC27, Reflection]. In their reflection, a collaborating teacher candidate also stated:

My experience has been that English language arts and English language development are the two subject areas that are always integrated in all lessons regardless of content. Math is usually a standalone subject. As I helped plan this unit, I came to see how math can be integrated in other content areas…In [my] lesson, math was a base that allowed students to discuss diversity among family units and promote inclusion.

[TC29, Reflection]

By shifting their understanding of what mathematics instruction could be, candidates on this journey were able to not only plan mathematically rigorous lessons for their students, they were also able to move beyond planning lessons that simply addressed mathematical content but incorporated opportunities for student engagement, drawing on language and literacy as anchors to engage justice-centered discussions. This process allowed for not just shifts in their own planning but in how their students engaged in the classroom. In reflecting on the use of the impact that planning a mathematics lesson connected to a multicultural children’s book had on students, a candidate stated:

I have a number of students who have Spanish as their primary home language. Because the copy I had was a bilingual text, I read the story in both English and Spanish. When I first did that, one emerging multilingual student, who often appears distracted during read-alouds, suddenly looked at me and lit up with a big smile. She was attentive for the entire story and contributed to discussions in both Spanish and English by sharing her own experiences with paletas and her family.

[TC27, Reflection]

Similarly to this teacher candidate’s journey, many candidates reported positive differences in student engagement, with increased comprehension of mathematical concepts when provided relevant contexts. Students were more engaged in conversations with each other, students were more confident and comfortable discussing ideas connected to their own experiences, and students were able to make real-world connections between the mathematics concepts they were learning and the world and communities around them. And this was especially true for candidates serving emergent bilingual students.

For teacher candidates on this journey, the shifts in understanding did not just center on their shifts in understanding in service of their students or end with the assignments in this course. Teacher candidates continue to extend the mathematical possibilities for learning. One teacher candidate shared:

I found that my creativity flourished when I integrated subjects together…I felt like I was able to create lessons the way I wanted to. Ones that are fun and engaging while also allowing students to learn and grow…I want to know how I can continue to do this? My goal is to get better and incorporate at least one a month when I am on my own next year.

[TC43, Reflection]

This dreaming and curiosity around how to continue engaging this process, noting the ways that teachers are able to connect mathematics to “fun and engaging” experiences that students can continue to implement throughout the year, further highlights the different levels of thinking and planning that the teacher candidate on this journey continued to construct for their own understanding of what integrating multicultural children’s literature and social justice into teaching mathematics to young learners can afford. To close on one teacher candidate’s words:

Most children’s books have mathematical concepts embedded in them. However, to see those concepts we must adopt a different perspective and definition of what math and math education look like. Math is all around us and we use it when we do many activities that encompass daily life.

[TC22, Reflection]

5.3. Portrait Two: Unearthing Teacher Candidates’ Tensions with Curriculum Integration

This second portrait highlights the journey of teacher candidates that voiced tensions toward engaging in this process of mathematics teaching. In particular, this portrait is shared to provide insights into the struggles that candidates faced when pushed to reorient their own conception of what mathematics teaching should be, the tensions they navigated throughout, and the implications for continued efforts.

“It Will Not Be Easy to Think Outside of the Box”

Within their reflections, several teacher candidates noted their initial hesitancy with planning a lesson and unit integrating mathematics with multicultural children’s literature and social justice as it was uncomfortable and did not make sense to them based on their previous experiences and conceptions of what mathematics teaching should be. The journey for these candidates required them to reconceptualize for themselves the purposes and goals of teaching and learning mathematics. One candidate in particular noted:

Growing up, I didn’t see a lot of creativity in teaching math. I mean, it’s just math. But now that I am in the classroom, I see that I have to take a creative approach…I was originally stressed about the concept of integration because it was something that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around to accomplish with much success, especially knowing that we would actually need to teach these lessons.

[TC17, Reflection]

For candidates on this journey, the thought of implementation felt daunting, given the siloed content teaching that defines middle school mathematics. Unlike their peers in self-contained elementary classrooms, this candidate was in an eighth grade math classroom and purely focused on teaching mathematics lessons across multiple periods. They struggled with imagining what integrating multicultural children’s literature into a math classroom would be. They further stated:

Planning the lesson was tough but the implementation was tougher. Trying to read a book to a bunch of middle schoolers gave me a mix of “we are too old for this” and “why are reading in a math class?” …I [had to] explain that this wasn’t something that will normally happen and that they may enjoy it.

[TC17, Reflection]

This candidate collaborated with peers on a unit that centered around the book Todos Iguales/All Equal: Un Corrido de/A Ballad of Lemon Grove by Christy Hale. They intentionally chose this book because they felt the “themes of equity and social justice connected with mathematical concepts like slope and y-intercept” [TC17/18/19, Book Selection], and allowed for addressing “inequalities that affect communities, particularly Hispanic individuals and their families, such as access to education or healthcare” [TC17/18/19, Book Selection]. Yet, from the initiation of book selection, the journey for these candidates centered around the mathematics concepts needed to be addressed, and for several candidates through this journey, they felt that addressing the social justice standards compromised the mathematics focus or vice versa. Another candidate within this same unit shared, “I think I focused a bit too much on the social justice side and not enough on the math. Next time I’ll make sure to put math at the forefront” [TC18, Reflection]. This sentiment reflected several candidates on this journey, where the tension to forefront mathematics reflects the increased pressures to present students with rote problem solving and engage direct instruction practices to attend to district pacing guides, all in service of preparing students for high-stakes testing. One candidate noted, “although teaching math this way is beneficial, it will be difficult to implement [since] there is an emphasis on test scores” [TC5, Reflection], with another further stating:

My mentor teacher keeps talking about the SBAC and the big test students have at the end of the school year before getting promoted to 7th grade…while I am able to identify a multitude of benefits from these cross-disciplinary, social justice centered literacy & mathematical units, my only concern is that they may take longer than conventional short and straight to the concept math lessons, and that I may not be able to cover all the mathematical concepts students need to learn before the end of the year exam.

[TC51, Reflection]

Candidates on this journey, particularly those in upper elementary and middle school contexts, wrestled with this tension of experiencing and recognizing the benefits of planning for collaborative, discourse-rich tasks that integrated multicultural children’s literature and helped provide relevance and critical thinking applications of mathematical concepts to address social justice issues, yet they were feeling pressure to prioritize direct instruction and the repetitive practice of problems given the high-stakes testing constraints of being in a tested grade. This journey continues to wrestle with the purpose of what teaching mathematics can be, as one candidate stated:

Reinventing and revitalizing math instruction will not happen in a day. The reward comes in the results I saw in my students…This learning experience was an essential one, and I believe more individual need to be exposed to ideas that go beyond the outdated education system that we have grown up in so that we can be better educators for the students of the future…I find myself wondering how this very modern, innovative idea of blending educational disciplines together will fit in the outdated system that employs me. It will not be easy to think outside of the box, when the world wants me to fit neatly within one.

[TC16, Reflection]

6. Discussion

The work that the teacher candidates in this study engaged in to integrate mathematics with social justice through the use of multicultural children’s literature offers a glimpse into the possibilities of mathematics teaching that frames mathematics as a tool for reading and writing the world (Gutstein, 2012). While some scholarship has considered the use of multicultural children’s math books (Harding et al., 2017), this study emphasized the use of multicultural children’s books in service of social justice integration into mathematics. The teacher candidates in this study were able to consider how the varying texts used could address the social justice standards across the four domains of Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action (Learning for Justice, 2022). While the majority of teacher candidates focused on addressing Identity and Diversity standards, some were successful in incorporating Justice and Action standards when selecting a book to anchor their lessons, and some were able to explicitly address these standards in their mathematics lessons and named being able to do so through the integration of multicultural children’s literature. In particular, this study revealed how the use of multicultural children’s literature proved to be a tool (Osorio, 2018) for teacher candidates to engage social justice standards in a mathematics lesson, allowing for students to develop an appreciation for individuality and diversity, as seen in the What Can You Do With a Paleta? unit, and consider issues of inequity and injustice, as was seen in the Land of the Cranes/A Seed in the Sun unit. Many teacher candidates similarly attended to and emphasized student belonging and socioemotional learning (Kokka, 2022) and the diversity that exists within the communities that students live in (Vasquez et al., 2019) through the lessons they designed and implemented.

This study further provides insights into the varying journeys that teacher candidates navigate in the lived realities of planning and implementing lessons across varying contexts. In particular, this study extends research that has documented the challenges that teachers navigate, such as time management and classroom management (Harding et al., 2017), to highlight the additional tensions that teacher candidates in this study wrestled with related to the limitations of being in testing grades that uphold narrow and limited conceptions of mathematics teaching (Berliner, 2011; LaMar et al., 2020), or feeling pressure to prioritize direct instruction approaches that are not conducive to the exploration of issues of injustice through mathematics.

Additionally, for many teacher candidates, this was their first experience integrating the social justice standards or multicultural children’s literature in mathematics lessons. While some candidates named this as a working tension, such as candidates that named limited exposure to creative teaching approaches with mathematics—“I mean, it’s just math,”—the journey pushed teachers to think differently, recognizing that shifting the tides takes time. In integrating mathematics with multicultural children’s literature, teacher candidates were also able to make connections between two disciplines that are not often placed together (Wall & Leckie, 2017), while integrating mathematics with social justice pushed candidates to recognize that students are not empty vessels or blanks slates (Freire, 1970) and even 4-year-olds are capable of engaging with understanding that who they are and the identities they hold are valid and can coexist with other’s identities that are similar or different. The findings from this study push teachers to see that attending to the social justice standards does not mean that every lesson needs to address injustice or spur action but rather highlight that every lesson can attend to “age-appropriate learning” along the continuum of “anti-bias, multicultural and social justice issues” (Learning for Justice, 2022, p. 2). Additionally, the majority of research related to the incorporation of social justice mathematics tends to be in secondary classrooms. This study adds to the literature of how social justice can be incorporated in elementary and middle school classrooms, but more research is needed in early childhood (TK-2) contexts.

This study further highlights the importance of cultivating collaborative networks and resources for teachers as they engage this work. While some resources such as the series books of Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Injustice (Bartell et al., 2022; Berry et al., 2020; Conway et al., 2022; Koestler et al., 2022) exist, not all these lessons have explicit centering or connections to multicultural children’s literature. This study contributes to the resources available, sharing examples of mathematics lessons addressing social justice standards using multiple multicultural children’s literature.

Lastly, even though teacher candidates struggled to balance the multiple goals within each lesson and unit, several candidates were able to integrate experiences, social contexts, and knowledge (Beane, 1997) to successfully engage their students in lessons that deepened students’ understanding of themselves, their integration within communities, and how those subsist within broader societies. This study highlights how this work can further support the learning of diverse learners, such as emergent bilingual students through the intentional use of translanguaging literature. More research on the integration of translanguaging literature to support mathematics learning tied to social justice learning is also needed.

Limitations

Similarly to the findings of Bartell (2013), the integration and balance of competing goals proved to be a challenge for many teachers, highlighting the need for more research and implementation supporting pre-service teachers to do this work. This work is especially relevant and timely given the future of education in a declining political climate. Additionally, this work was conducted with teacher candidates in a teacher preparation program that explicitly names a commitment to “prepare candidates to teach in culturally and linguistically diverse communities” that is more broadly situated in a state with policies that are accepting and embrace diversity and inclusion and the benefits of integrating this into teaching. More work is needed in contexts where more restrictive and constraining policies are in place.

7. Conclusions

This study examined how teacher candidates negotiated curriculum integration of mathematics with social justice through the use of multicultural children’s literature. The findings revealed that while this process of planning was challenging for many teacher candidates, multicultural children’s literature books provided an anchoring context for teacher candidates to consider in their lesson planning. Additionally, some teacher candidates were able to draw on these contexts to design lessons that explicitly addressed social justice standards through mathematical activity. This study and the integration approaches presented may offer a way to support both in-service and pre-service teachers to ground mathematics in justice-oriented approaches, where students are more engaged and are able to connect mathematical learning to real-world and useful meaningful applications in their lived experiences. Future research may extend to include the experiences of students who engage in these lessons and the ongoing professional development of teachers to engage more critically with the social justice standards to successfully work towards justice and action through mathematical learning.