Supermarkets, Highways, and Natural Gas Production: Statistics and Social Justice

We present several modules that address social justice issues in an introductory statistics course. The activities consider possible disparities of housing location, language spoken at home, and job sector as they relate to, respectively, access to healthy foods, air pollution via proximity to traffic, and health concerns via proximity to fracking sites. Statistical content includes basic descriptive statistics, survey design and analysis, contingency tables, independence, various quantiles, and hypothesis testing. We describe the assignments, which satisfy some GAISE Guidelines, and we report on their implementation. Along the way, we share the challenges we faced and overcame as novices in the social justice community.