The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is co-sponsoring the following event:
The Department of African American Studies is thrilled to announce that Dr. Robert Parris Moses, a key leader of the 1964 Freedom Summer drive for voting rights and the founder of the Algebra Project will address the TCNJ campus community Thursday, February 2 at 4 PM in the Mayo Concert Hall. The program will include a presentation by Dr. Moses along with ample opportunity for questions and dialogue. Dr. Moses books will be available in the campus bookstore and he will be on hand to sign copies at the conclusion of the program. We have assembled a web page with background materials related to Dr. Moses, Freedom Summer, and the Algebra Project, that might be useful for your classes.
As the former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Mississippi Project in the 1960s, an architect of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, and a Harvard Philosophy PhD, Dr. Moses has a wealth of experience in civil and human rights. Since the 1980s, Dr. Moses has converted those experiences into a program of innovative approaches to education for underserved and distressed communities in the United States and abroad. Dr. Moses’s efforts resulted in the creation of the Algebra Project in 1982, an initiative designed to create “sustainable, student centered models” for school reform that builds “coalitions of stakeholders within local communities, particularly underserved” populations.
The Algebra Project, which emphasizes math skills and pedagogy, has gained national recognition as a community-based, bottom-up approach that is innovative and sensitive to vagaries of state and local budgets. Dr. Moses has captured many of the ideas for the Algebra Project in his acclaimed 2001 co-authored book, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project that Princeton Professor, Dr. Cornel West, described as “the definitive book on one of the most important projects of youth empowerment and citizenship of our time.” His articles on improving mathematics education have appeared in such influential journals as Social Policy, Phi Delta Kappan, and the Journal of Mathematical Behavior.
Dr. Moses’s presentation will invite the TCNJ community, local citizens, and state leaders to discuss the prevailing challenges to education and consider creative solutions that draw upon our strengths.