QR Learning for addressing social and racial injustice

The current proposal envisions developing alternative pedagogical materials for the “Measuring Racial Inequality” course, written in plain language and accessible to students from social sciences/humanities and underserved communities and families. In its statistical and mathematic dimensions, our course will focus on how to construct, calculate, and understand the indexes applied to measure social and racial inequality, as expressed by Gini, Theil, and Atkinson Indexes, as well as the Oaxaca-Blinder method of decomposition to calculate the height of the marginal effect of discrimination on the inequality. We will also use the indexes to study problems of dissimilarity and segregation in the urban space and as the scale of measurement of ethnic-racial distance, including an introduction to the multivariate analysis. This proposal focused on developing alternative teaching methods for a QR/Math Core Curriculum course that simultaneously emphasizes social responsibility and engagement and alternative pedagogical approaches that can make “numbers” more accessible for all students