Foreword to Special Issue: Why and How STEM Education Matters in Social Justice Movements

Soon after several years of teaching middle and high school mathematics, I found myself in graduate school, struggling to grapple with critical studies of math education that revealed how the field can and does serve as a gatekeeper in educational institutions, and further, that it plays no less a colonizing role than any other discipline. Math education has long played a pivotal role in colonizing minds, and I eventually came to recognize and write about how my own courses contributed to this process, even while striving to teach math in-action and in-application, math to identify and disentangle and address problems in our lives and communities, and math as a tool for addressing inequity. The range of topics in these articles gives us a taste of the breadth and depth of presentations and conversations at the conference: from innovative and model K-12 and higher-education courses that serve marginalized cultural groups and communities locally and internationally; to the teachers and teacher educators who contribute to such interventions, and ways that they are imagining and embodying very different ways to "be" educators; to the broader landscape of what STEM curriculum could look like and how the field of STEM has evolved historically, and the debates and questions that maintain relevance and significance today.