Long-time civil rights activist Robert (Bob) Moses, a pioneer in teaching math literacy for economic access, will celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by leading a two-day discussion Jan. 14-15 on “We the People: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Education.”
Co-sponsored by the School of Education, the Center for Educational Outreach and the National Center for Institutional Diversity, Moses will speak about quality education and how it can be achieved for all American youth at 5-6:30 p.m. Jan. 14 in the Great Lakes Room at Palmer Commons.
He and representatives from the Young People’s Project also will facilitate a community forum on education reform efforts at 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Jan. 15 at Washtenaw Community College’s Student Center Building, 4800 E. Huron River Dr., Ypsilanti.
During the 1960s, Moses was a key figure in the civil rights movement, organizing voter registration drives, sit-ins and Freedom Schools for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Today he runs the Algebra Project, a national mathematics literacy effort he founded in the 1980s to help low-income students and students of color successfully achieve math skills.
Moses believes that in order to be economically successful, students must be proficient in math and science.
“Algebra was assigned a certain role, a certain place in the education system,” Moses says in his book “Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights.” “Students learned how to manipulate abstract symbolic representations for underlying mathematical concepts. Now, technology places abstract symbolic representations front and center.
“These representations are the tools that control the technology, and in order to use technology to organize work you have to understand these symbolic representations and the place that society has assigned for young people to learn this symbolism — this is algebra. So, while the visible manifestation of the technological shift is the computer, that hidden culture of computers is math.”
Moses and other prominent educators have initiated a national campaign to build support for a constitutional amendment to guarantee a quality education for all American children. His visit is part of the national “We the People” tour of campuses and communities to foster creative conversations about what constitutes a quality education and how it might be achieved.
