Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars. The authors' thoughtful ICUCARE equity framework serves as a lens to help teachers see where they are achieving this alignment and where they are not.
Through this lens, choosing to see means caring enough about what you see to act. It means accepting that every one of your students can be an expert given the opportunity. It means recognizing negative stereotypes about marginalized students and understanding their effects. It means knowing that your students have rich lives outside the classroom that can inform what you do inside the classroom. And it means recognizing and celebrating their human dimensions, so that all students' strengths, capabilities, and talents can grow.