Reimagining mathematics education

Most Saturdays, you can find secondary education professor, Kwesi Yaro — along with a contingent of colleagues and undergraduate students he has mobilized to join him — volunteering as a math tutor at the Edmonton Newcomer Centre. 

Working with students from refugee and low socioeconomic backgrounds, Yaro and his fellow volunteers fill a crucial void for young people in the community who need math support but are unable to afford a tutor.  

This is just one of the ways Yaro lives the values of equity, diversity and inclusion that guide his work as a researcher in the Faculty of Education.

“For me, it’s about who I am as an immigrant and how I want to be useful to my community,” he says. “I’m very enthusiastic about serving the Black immigrants and other marginalized communities.”

Placing math education in cultural contexts 

From his years as a teacher in Ghana to his current role as an assistant professor, Yaro’s approach to mathematics education has been shaped by a strong belief that it needs to be rooted in cultural knowledge. 

“Math typically has been seen as a very western subject, devoid of context,” he explains. “But mathematics to me is very, very contextual.” 

As a high school math teacher in his home country, Yaro dealt with the question of how parents with minimal or no formal education support their children’s mathematics learning.  

Yaro pursued this question further when he completed a master’s degree in mathematics education at the University of British Columbia. During fieldwork with rural communities in Ghana, he witnessed the ways in which the local people were engaging in mathematical activities on a daily basis. 

“It was very intriguing to me how these cultural resources that students brought to math classrooms were not honoured by teachers,” he says. 

Understanding immigrant experiences

For his doctoral work at UBC, Yaro shifted his research to a Canadian context, investigating the role sub-Saharan African immigrants play in their children’s mathematics learning. 

Yaro has continued this research since joining the U of A, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant he and his colleague David Wagner from the University of New Brunswick received in 2023. 

In partnership with the Edmonton Newcomer Centre, they have spent the last two years conducting focus groups with African students, parents and community leaders to better understand their experiences and perspectives in supporting children’s learning. 

Yaro believes this knowledge can equip teachers to engage in a more culturally responsive mathematics curriculum and pedagogy. 

“If we want to really develop pedagogies that are responsive to the communities we serve, I think the starting point is for us to understand the experiences students are bringing into our classrooms that we could leverage to support learning instead of seeing these experiences as deficits,” he says, highlighting the importance of this approach in a country that prides itself on multiculturalism.

Looking ahead, Yaro says the next step for this research will be applying for a SSHRC Insight Grant to build on their findings by drawing a direct link between teachers and parents. He envisions a grassroots, rather than top-down, approach to mathematics curriculum development where parents will be facilitators of knowledge. 

Supporting Black youth

Along with his volunteer work in the community, Yaro is actively involved with two initiatives at the U of A.

He serves as a mentor with both the Black Youth for Social Innovation (BYSI) program for undergraduate students and the Black Youth Mentorship and Leadership program for high school students. 

Through both programs, Yaro engages Black youth in research projects and hopes to inspire them to pursue undergraduate and graduate education. 

“The idea is to make sure Black youth are able to take on leadership positions,” he says. “The more we have our own at the decision-making table, the more we can advocate for the broader good of our community.”