Amy Brass helps future teachers rewrite the story of math

Math can become a quiet kind of gatekeeper long before students ever realize it.

Sometimes it arrives as a knot in the stomach before a test. Sometimes it sounds like, "I'm just not a math person." And sometimes it takes hold in the very people who will one day stand at the front of elementary classrooms, shaping how children come to understand numbers, patterns and their own abilities.

That is the challenge Amy Brass, Ph.D., is working to change at the University of New Mexico College of Education & Human Sciences (COEHS). As an assistant professor of mathematics education in the Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy, Brass works with future elementary teachers who often enter her classroom carrying years of complicated feelings about math, not all of them positive. Her work begins there, with the belief that before teachers can help children build confidence in mathematics, many must first rebuild that confidence in themselves.

Brass knows those feelings do not emerge in a vacuum. Teachers today are being asked to do more and more, she said, often without the flexibility they need to respond to students in the ways they know are best. Even as Brass emphasized the promising work happening in New Mexico schools, she sees a system that can place so much emphasis on improving scores that it narrows teachers' freedom to teach responsively, creatively and with trust in their own judgment.

"Teachers are amazing. They are superheroes. They give and give and give."

- Amy Brass, College of Education and Human Sciences

Her answer is not to make math simpler. It is to make it more human.

In Brass's classes, future educators are invited to experience mathematics as exploration rather than performance. One routine she uses, "Which One Doesn't Belong?," asks students to study four images, numbers or equations and explain which one does not fit, and why. The power of the exercise is that more than one answer can be right. Students begin to see that mathematical thinking is not always about arriving at a single predetermined path. It can also be about reasoning, perspective and the confidence to say, "Here is how I see it."

That shift matters, especially for elementary teachers, who often teach children during the years when academic identities first begin to form. Brass said many of her students come in uncertain of their own mathematical capability. She works to show them not only that they can do math, but that there is value in their thinking, value that may have gone unrecognized in more rigid learning environments.

Her classroom also pushes beyond the idea of math as an isolated subject.

This semester, Brass has teamed up with Rachael Perea, a social studies teacher educator, to bring their classes together several times to explore how math and social studies can be taught in conversation with one another. Their students examine graphs, voting districts, gerrymandering and economic inequality, using mathematics as a way to understand history, civic life and community. For pre-service teachers, the experience helps widen the frame: math is not only something to solve on paper, but something that can help young learners make sense of the world around them.

Brass is also asking students to choose children's books focused on real-world themes, from voting and immigration to family structures and environmental concerns and build math tasks around them. For many future teachers, especially those who more naturally identify with literacy and language arts, the assignment opens an important door. It shows that math can live alongside story, culture and lived experience, rather than apart from them.

The through-line in all of this is application.

Brass teaches math through discussion-based reasoning, hands-on learning and manipulatives, offering students an experience that often differs sharply from the one they had growing up. Her hope is that they will carry those approaches into their own classrooms and, in doing so, begin to change the broader narrative around math in K-12 education.

That commitment to rethinking mathematics education also extends into Brass's scholarship.

Before coming to UNM, Brass taught and worked with pre-service teachers in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Australia. Her international experience led to her role helping adapt an Australian version of one of the most widely used mathematics methods textbooks for elementary teacher preparation in the United States. More recently, her research has focused on math and citizenship, exploring how mathematics education can help students develop as community members and engaged citizens. She is now co-leading a new working group in the United States that is in conversation with a leading scholar in Australia around those ideas.

For Brass, that work is still in its early stages. But the questions driving it are consistent with what happens every day in her classroom at UNM: How do people learn? How do they see themselves? And how can math become a tool not for exclusion, but for understanding?

For UNM College of Education & Human Sciences Dean Kris Goodrich, that mission reflects something larger about the role of teacher preparation in New Mexico.

"At the College of Education & Human Sciences, we know the way children come to see themselves as learners is shaped in no small part by the teachers who guide them," COEHS Dean Kristopher Goodrich said. "Dr. Brass's work speaks to the heart of that responsibility. She is helping future educators approach mathematics with greater confidence, creativity and care, while also preparing them to help young learners see math as meaningful, relevant and within reach. That kind of preparation matters deeply as we work to keep New Mexico moving, growing and learning."

In Brass's classroom, the work often begins with future teachers reexamining what math has meant in their own lives.

What she offers them is not just a new instructional strategy or a stronger lesson plan, but a new way of thinking about the subject itself: less as a barrier to get through, and more as a language for curiosity, connection and possibility.