In our classrooms, we may not often think of technology as a tool for teaching for social justice. But in my experience of teaching middle school mathematics, I've found that technology can be a powerful asset.

Although I am a university-based mathematics educator, I regularly teach at Rivera school, located in a Mexican immigrant community in Chicago. The following are examples of how my students and I have used technology to investigate racial profiling and to analyze the relationship of family income level to scores on standardized tests.

In particular, I want to show the potential of using graphing calculators with students. (A graphing calculator is basically a hand-held computer that can do sophisticated mathematics, display various types of graphs and create tables from data, and perform various types of statistical analyses. While they are still too expensive for many students, many high school and middle school math departments have them.)

Mathematics plays a central role in understanding racial profiling. The essence of profiling is proportion and expected value: A higher proportion of African Americans (or Arabs/Arab Americans today) are stopped and searched than would be expected given their percentage in the population - assuming random (i.e., fair) searches or stops.

DRIVING WHILE BLACK

In 2001, I did a project with my seventh- grade class called, "Driving While Black/Driving While Brown: A Mathematics Project About Racial Profiling." I gave students data about percentages of stops of Latino drivers and the percent of Latino drivers in Illinois. This was a difficult project conceptually because students had little experience with the mathematical ideas of expectation. Also, there is plenty of research documenting confusion about basic probability, in both children and adults. Children often believe results based on a few events and tend to overgeneralize. For example, if one tosses an unbiased coin three times and it comes up heads each time, children may wrongly believe that the odds are better (or worse!) than 50 percent that the next toss will be tails.