Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Mathematics Education

Adopted March 10, 2023

We, the members of the Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics, agree with and fully support NCTM’s position on access and equity in mathematics education.

With this in mind, the VCTM board commits to the following actions in order to fight the inequality that persists in our classrooms, schools, and state:

We commit to providing professional development opportunities for Virginia mathematics teachers in areas such as building and improving cultural competence, anti-racist classroom practices, and culturally responsive and social justice mathematics.

We commit to supporting teachers as they teach marginalized students through professional learning opportunities focused on their unique classroom needs. These may include teaching strategies such as creating a culturally relevant curriculum, removing existing barriers that prevent these students' learning, understanding the impact of in-school and out of school stressors and trauma, etc.

We commit to supporting and encouraging teachers of color through networking opportunities and diversifying our speakers at annual meetings and encourage affiliates to do the same.

We commit to supporting and sustaining a regular Access, Equity, and Social Justice column section to the Virginia Mathematics Teacher (VMT) journal. It will be available with other free preview articles on the VCTM website.

We commit to creating an access and equity strand at future annual conferences. We also commit to connecting teachers to external professional development opportunities and resources related to equity in mathematics.

We commit to providing professional development opportunities for mathematics teachers to learn about the use and implementation of educational technology, with explicit focus on how educational technology can be used to enable equitable, socially just, and culturally responsive teaching and learning of mathematics, and also how educational technology can preclude equitable, socially just, and culturally responsive teaching and learning of mathematics when socioeconomic class, race, gender, culture, place, and language are not considered as fundamental implications of the access to and use of technology.

We commit to creating and sustaining an Access and Equity Committee that will oversee our commitment to these actions.

VCTM acknowledges that cultural and structural inequities continue to persist in Virginia’s mathematics classrooms. We also recognize the critical need to support mathematics teachers committed to creating and sustaining a culture of access and equity in their classrooms. Through the actions outlined above, we desire to improve classroom practices that support equity-based mathematics teaching.