Great news! This class is completely free of additional costs—yay! 🎉 You won’t have to pay for a textbook, StatCrunch, or ALEKS homework. The course is designed to be Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) by carefully curating and combining Open Educational Resources (OER) from across the state. The goal is to make quality education accessible to everyone, ensuring that financial barriers don’t stand in the way of your success.

The layout and bulk of the free class content is all thanks to the amazing Dr. Katie Lucero. Katie did a ton of hard work creating and streamlining this course and then shared it freely so students like you can succeed without breaking the bank. Let’s give her a huge round of applause! 👏👏👏

One thing I really admire about Katie’s work is how streamlined and organized it is. Online courses can feel overwhelming when there’s too much content, and trust me, I’ve seen it. Some of the lists of sent my anxiety through the roof with so much content, so many pages, and so many assignments to keep track of!

That’s why I’m so grateful for Katie’s thoughtful design. Her class is the least overwhelming layout I’ve ever seen for this subject, and it really helps make the material accessible and manageable. By focusing on clear, streamlined content and replacing paid tools like ALEKS with free, meaningful projects, we get the best of both worlds: affordability and engagement. 🙌

We are incredibly blessed 🙌 to be working with the amazing content from Statistics for Social Justice ✊📊. Many of our discussions 💬 and projects 📝 are inspired by the powerful ideas in this course.

In a humanist sense, being blessed means feeling grateful, fortunate, or enriched by meaningful experiences, relationships, and opportunities—without implying divine intervention. It reflects an appreciation for luck, privilege, hard work, and the kindness of others that contribute to positive circumstances.

For example, someone might say they feel blessed to have a supportive community, access to education, or the chance to make a difference in the world—not because of supernatural favor, but because of human connection, opportunity, and shared effort. 💡✨

👇 Check this out! 👇
Below is an exclusive excerpt from their letter to us, generously shared alongside their full course 📖. Take a moment to dive in, reflect, and explore their vision and message for using statistics as a tool for justice! 💡💪

Letter to Students and Instructors

Preface to Statistics for Social Justice

We first conceived this project in 2019. We were excited by the prospect of creating and sharing Statistics resources that would help to engage community college students with applications relating to their own life experiences.

Our focus would be problems relating to equity and social justice. We planned to foreground issues that disproportionately affect poor and working-class students and under-represented groups. These included education, health, and race, ethnic, and gender discrimination.

We did not anticipate doing this work in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the light of the massive anti-racist protests following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. But these events helped to inspire and shape the contents of this workbook.

Covid-19 controversies have made the importance of statistical literacy increasingly clear. New young activists are developing a greater appreciation of how to use statistics to analyze inequities and organize against them.

Many students, colleges, and colleagues are becoming more interested in curriculum supporting equity. With growing numbers of community college students enrolling in statistics classes, we hope that the resources in this workbook will be broadly useful.

Additional Notes

We recognize that some critical social justice issues are not sufficiently represented here. These include immigration, LGBTQ+ concerns, housing and food security, and the environmental emergency. We hope that other instructors will be encouraged to help remedy this weakness.

We apologize in advance for any errors you might encounter in this workbook. Please bring them to our attention via email to Bonnie Blustein: Bonnie Blustein.

Further Resources

See below for a list of selected additional resources for Social Justice Mathematics:

TODOS
Radical Math
Teaching Math for Social Justice
Math and Social Justice: A Collaborative MTBoS Site
Critical Values and Transforming Data: Teaching Statistics with Social Justice - Lawrence M. Lesser (Published by the American Statistical Association)

Most of these focus on high-school level mathematics. However, all include some topics covered in Statistics.

We are grateful to the Open Educational Resources Initiative of the Academic Senate of California Community Colleges for its financial and other support of this project. We thank, especially, Prof. Suzanne Wakim, our Project Manager, for her timely and cheerful support.

Contributors

Bonnie Blustein, West Los Angeles College
Jeremy Jankans, West Los Angeles College
Daniel Judge, East Los Angeles College
Joy Ogami-Avila, West Los Angeles College
Matt Robertson, West Los Angeles College and El Camino College
Vitaly Shvetsov, Los Angeles Valley College
Safaa Dabagh, West Los Angeles College

November 30, 2020