TODOS 2026 Conference

Are you looking for ways to incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into your teaching through culturally relevant pedagogy? Would you like to incorporate more mathematical discourse and student thinking in your elementary or middle school math lessons? Place-based Image Talks do both! In a Place-based Image Talk, teachers use a local image to pose mathematical questions, increasing entry points into the conversation and helping all students see themselves within mathematics. Place-based Image Talks can also be used to empower students by providing opportunities to use mathematics to understand and agentically connect with local community issues.

This session engages participants in Trans Math Languaging (TML) –a framework integrating translanguaging, hybridity, co-knowledge creation, and emotional reflexivity to rehumanize mathematics. Through the interactive lesson Building Thinking Circles: Falling forever and Infinite Mathematical Possibilities, participants experience how multilingual and identity-affirming pedagogy cultivates belonging and creativity. Grounded in the Todos/NCSM (2016) Social Justice Position Statement, research on whiteness emotionality (Matias, 2016), and rehumanizing mathematics (Gutiérrez, 2018), this session bridges theory and practice to demonstrate how emotional, linguistic, and cultural repertoires can transform mathematics into a space of humanity and collective agency.

Mathematics as a school subject is a cultural product developed by generations of mathematicians. The conventions we teach—the symbols we privilege, the names we memorialize, and the algorithms we call “standard”—are culturally constructed and historically exclusive. By uncritically reproducing these conventions, we risk reinforcing an epistemology that denies students’ cultural and intellectual identities. This session introduces a framework that organizes mathematical conventions into seven categories and invites participants to acknowledge their origins, examine their rationales, and explore non-Western alternatives through interactive tasks that involve unpacking, breaking, and reimagining familiar conventions in mathematics teaching and learning.

This session explores how high school math teachers shifted from deficit to asset-based positioning of emergent bilinguals (EBs) through a year-long collaborative professional development focused on mathematical modeling. Using positioning theory as an analytical lens, we examine how classroom discourse shapes student agency and access to mathematics. Participants will engage in interactive activities, including sorting excerpts and reflective discussions, to analyze how language and context influence perceptions of EBs’ capabilities. We share findings from seven teachers working with linguistically diverse students and offer actionable strategies for fostering equity and transforming institutional structures in mathematics education.

Being a new teacher is exciting and challenging. How can new teachers, especially those committed to teaching in equitable and humanizing ways, be supported to thrive (instead of just survive)? Join us as we share how one group of new teachers and their former math education professor supported each other through critical friendship in a monthly community of practice. What are early-career teachers grappling with as they strive to teach in equitable ways? How can you support early career teachers? Come find out and connect with us!

Do you want to practice creating or adapting social justice oriented math tasks and curriculum? Do you want students to see how math can be connected to topics outside their textbooks?
In this session, we will be discussing how to adapt or enhance a provided curriculum and adjust or add onto provided problems withing a curriculum through a lens of meaningfulness and social justice. Whether you’re beginning your journey or have experience and are looking for new perspectives, you’ll leave with implementable strategies and steps for the upcoming school year.

Many people feel unwelcome in mathematics – a regrettable, but not inevitable, circumstance. In this session, I will share the goals and videos from a project documenting adults’ lived experiences of mathematics. In these videos, participants share how they engage in mathematics in their lives and how these experiences relate – or do not easily relate – to their memories of school “mathematics”. Many participants are members of historically marginalized groups. Session attendees will be invited to reflect on their own experiences and to consider how these stories could help to catalyze collaborative and sustained work to center humanity in school mathematics.