The Math in Democracy (MinD) project expands availability of classroom-ready materials to support democratic dialogues in high school with a focus on topics that require quantitative elements – information which we argue is crucial for understanding collective challenges and solutions (Ani, 2021). Many civic issues cannot be fully examined without attending to information or analyses that involves quantitative reasoning or mathematics in some way. Through the development of MinD lessons, we aim to both shed light on the role of mathematics in civic dialogue, as well as prompt more conversations in high school classrooms that are examples of democratic dialogues. We leverage the Collaborative Conversations protocol that was developed based on the Encounters model, to promote these mathematically informed democratic discussions. We produced and piloted three full lessons, now publicly available. We hope you enjoy these lessons, use them as “existence proofs” of the feasibility of this work, and are inspired to pursue advancing mathematics as a support for democratic dialogues in the future.
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