There is a moment in every math classroom when the numbers stop being abstract. When the formula on the board connects to something a student cares about the recipe they help their grandmother cook, the way their favorite sports team calculates statistics, the budget they are already keeping in a notebook. For educators trained in the humanities, that moment of connection is not incidental. It is the whole point.
Across schools, training programs, and educational research institutions, a quiet shift is underway. Educators with backgrounds in literature, history, philosophy, and social studies are bringing their skills into math learning environments and in doing so, they are developing approaches that are being adopted, adapted, and shared across the field. The techniques they have refined grounded in storytelling, cultural responsiveness, and critical analysis are finding their way into widely-used teaching frameworks and professional development resources.
The Myth of the Two Cultures
For decades, the humanities and STEM fields have been portrayed as opposing camps. STEM majors were told they would land higher salaries at graduation. Humanities majors were told they would catch up later, thanks to adaptability and critical thinking skills. But research has complicated that narrative. A 2024 analysis cited by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Northern Illinois University found that while STEM majors might begin their careers with higher salaries, humanities majors often close the gap by mid-career, benefiting from the very qualities that industries are increasingly valuing: adaptability, critical thinking, and the ability to communicate complex ideas clearly.
This reframing matters for how we think about math education. If the humanities develop skills that employers and communities actually need and if those skills complement more than compete with technical expertise then the boundary between a literature classroom and a math classroom becomes less a wall and more a doorway.
"Student complaints about non-STEM general education courses are both misguided and short-sighted STEM and humanities aren't opposites; they actually complement each other," write Bourdeau and Wood in research that has informed interdisciplinary curriculum design. Their work proposes "Humanistic STEM," an approach that blends scientific and technical studies with an emphasis on human welfare, values, and culture. Unlike STEAM, which typically emphasizes the arts, Humanistic STEM prioritizes interdisciplinary collaboration and integration of perspectives across STEM and humanities.
What the Humanities Bring to Math
When humanities-trained educators enter math learning spaces, they arrive with a toolkit that is different from, but not inferior to, traditional math pedagogy. They are practiced in asking why. They are comfortable with ambiguity. They understand that meaning is constructed, not simply received.
According to research compiled by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, humanities courses encourage students to engage with nuanced issues and explore diverse perspectives, providing what MIT Open Learning describes as transformative learning experiences. By studying both humanities and STEM, students can become well-rounded and globally aware graduates who think critically and are ready to solve tomorrow's toughest challenges with both technical expertise and ethical insight.
For math specifically, these skills translate into several distinct advantages. Humanities-trained educators are often more adept at helping students see the narrative embedded in mathematical problems. They understand that a word problem is not just a vessel for numbers it is a story, and students who can enter that story will engage with it more deeply. They are practiced in helping students communicate their reasoning, write out their thought processes, and defend their answers. And they tend to be more attentive to the cultural contexts that shape how students relate to mathematics.
"In order to reach learners, creating instruction that is comparative and applicable to students' experiences can be a treasured tool," writes Chiquita Jenkins, a second-grade teacher and doctoral candidate at St. John's University, in an Education Week opinion piece on culturally responsive math teaching. "Students may be captivated by an understanding that math exists all around us."
The Research Behind the Approach
The intersection of humanities and math instruction is not merely theoretical. A substantial body of research supports specific teaching strategies that humanities-trained educators are particularly well-positioned to implement.
Yenda, a researcher whose work is cited in teaching strategy guides, developed approaches to math instruction that emphasized conceptual understanding alongside procedural fluency. Her methods, which drew on cognitive science and classroom observation, have been incorporated into widely-used teaching frameworks. Central to her approach was the idea that students need to understand not just how to solve a problem, but why the solution works and what the problem is really asking them to do.
Research from Structural Learning, updated in 2026, synthesizes evidence-based teaching strategies from figures like Rosenshine, Hattie, and the Education Endowment Foundation. Their guide identifies practices that lead to clear learning gains, including direct instruction, feedback, and retrieval practice. But the guide also emphasizes that effective teaching requires more than technique it requires judgment, responsiveness, and the ability to read a classroom. These are precisely the skills that humanities training cultivates.
"For teachers, the skill is choosing the right strategy for the goal, not collecting techniques," the Structural Learning guide notes. This framing resonates with how humanities-trained educators often approach their work: not as technicians applying fixed procedures, but as interpreters making decisions in context.
Culturally Responsive Math Teaching
One of the most significant contributions humanities-trained educators have made to math learning is the development of culturally responsive approaches. While the concept of culturally responsive teaching has been discussed in English and history classrooms for years, applying it to math has required educators to think carefully about how mathematical concepts are framed, presented, and connected to students' lived experiences.
Writing in Education Week, Larry Ferlazzo and a team of contributors including Chiquita Jenkins, Autumn Kelley, James Ewing, and Cindy Garcia outlined twelve ways to make math more culturally responsive. Their recommendations included connecting math to community and collaboration, using comparative and applicable instruction, and helping students see math as a tool for understanding the world beyond an abstract set of rules.
Jenkins, who teaches second grade in New York, emphasized the importance of making math relevant to students' experiences. "Students may be captivated by an understanding that math exists all around us," she noted. "From the arrangement of rows and columns to the patterns in nature, math is woven into the fabric of daily life." This kind of contextualization helping students see mathematics as embedded in human experience more than as a foreign language to be decoded is a hallmark of humanities-informed math instruction.
Storytelling in the Math Classroom
One of the most powerful tools in the humanities-trained educator's kit is storytelling. The ability to craft a narrative, to build tension, to make a listener care about what happens next these skills have traditionally been associated with English and creative writing classes. But they are equally valuable in math instruction.
Research from the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning highlights the role of storytelling in making technical work impactful. "Whether crafting compelling grant proposals and journal articles, or communicating ideas in public and professional settings, being able to frame technical information in a narrative context is essential," the center notes. This principle extends naturally to the math classroom, where word problems and real-world applications are essentially stories with numbers embedded in them.
Humanities-trained educators are often more attuned to the narrative structure of mathematical problems. They notice when a problem's framing is confusing, when the context is unfamiliar to students, when the story being told does not match the mathematical concept being taught. They are practiced in rewriting problems, creating new scenarios, and helping students see the story beneath the numbers.
"Storytelling plays an important role in making technical work impactful," the center observes. This is not a soft observation it is a practical insight about how human cognition works. We remember stories better than abstractions. We engage with narratives more deeply than with formulas. And students who can see the story in a math problem are better equipped to solve it.
Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum
Critical thinking is often cited as a goal of humanities education, but it is equally essential to mathematical reasoning. The ability to question assumptions, evaluate evidence, consider multiple perspectives, and construct a logical argument these skills are not confined to the philosophy classroom. They are the foundation of mathematical thinking.
Humanities-trained educators bring a particular sensitivity to the critical analysis of problems. They are practiced in asking students to examine the framing of a problem, to consider what is being assumed, to think about what might be missing. This kind of metacognitive attention thinking about thinking is increasingly recognized as essential to effective learning.
According to learning theory research from the Institute for Opinion Research, learning theories describe the conditions and processes through which learning occurs, providing teachers with models to develop instruction sessions that lead to better learning. These theories explain the processes that people engage in as they make sense of information, and how they integrate that information into their mental models so that it becomes new knowledge. For humanities-trained educators, this framework validates what they have always intuitively understood: that learning is not passive reception but active construction.
Multiple Intelligences and Math Learning
Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, developed by the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, offers another lens through which to understand the humanities-math connection. Gardner's framework identifies multiple distinct intelligences including verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial-visual, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, and interpersonal intelligences that individuals possess in varying degrees.
For math education, this framework has important implications. Students who struggle with logical-mathematical reasoning may excel in spatial-visual or bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. Humanities-trained educators, who are often strong in verbal-linguistic and interpersonal intelligences, may be better equipped to connect mathematical concepts to these other domains. They can translate abstract numerical relationships into stories, visual representations, physical activities, and collaborative discussions.
The Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning notes that beyond the familiar categories of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning, many theories of human learning potential have been established. Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is among the most influential, and it provides a theoretical foundation for the kind of differentiated, humanities-informed math instruction that is gaining traction in schools.
Building Bridges in Teacher Training
If humanities-trained educators bring valuable skills to math instruction, the question becomes how to support them in developing the technical knowledge they may lack. Professional development programs are increasingly recognizing the value of interdisciplinary training, and some teacher preparation programs are beginning to incorporate humanities-informed approaches into their STEM education tracks.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame, in an article on how humanities teachers can strengthen STEM learning, emphasizes the importance of cross-curricular connections. "Through experiences combining STEM and humanities, educators can bridge the gap between technical skills and critical thinking about societal challenges," the article notes. "From helping students explore the history of inventions to explaining how scientific discoveries propel humanity forward, humanities teachers often add value to STEM programs even without STEM teaching experience."
This framing is significant. It suggests that humanities skills are not merely supplementary to math instruction they are foundational. A teacher who understands the history of mathematical discovery, who can connect a geometry lesson to the architecture of the student's neighborhood, who can help students see the human stories behind great mathematical insights, brings something that purely technical training cannot provide.
What This Means for KnowledgePosts Readers
For readers researching teaching strategies, learning resources, and practitioner approaches, the humanities-math intersection offers a rich area of exploration. The sources compiled here suggest several practical takeaways: that culturally responsive math teaching is supported by both research and classroom practice; that storytelling and narrative framing are evidence-based strategies, not merely stylistic preferences; that professional development programs are increasingly valuing interdisciplinary skills; and that the boundary between humanities and STEM education is more permeable than traditional assumptions suggest.
Readers who are educators, parents, or learners themselves will find that the techniques described here are not exotic or experimental. They are grounded in established research from Rosenshine's principles to Gardner's multiple intelligences to culturally responsive teaching frameworks and they are being implemented by real educators in real classrooms. The question is not whether these approaches work, but how to learn more about them and apply them effectively.
Where to Read Further
For readers who want to explore these ideas more deeply, several resources offer direct access to the research and frameworks discussed in this article. The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Northern Illinois University provides an extensive guide to Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, including practical applications for classroom instruction. The Structural Learning site's guide to 21 Teaching Strategies Backed by Research offers a comprehensive overview of evidence-based approaches from Rosenshine, Hattie, and the Education Endowment Foundation. For perspectives on culturally responsive math teaching, the Education Week opinion piece on Twelve Ways to Make Math More Culturally Responsive provides specific classroom strategies from practicing educators. Finally, the National Inventors Hall of Fame's article on How Humanities Teachers Can Strengthen STEM Learning offers practical guidance for educators seeking to bridge disciplinary boundaries.
These resources represent a growing body of work that recognizes what humanities-trained educators have always known: that the skills developed in literature, history, and philosophy classrooms are not soft skills. They are the skills of meaning-making, critical analysis, cultural awareness, and narrative understanding and they are exactly what mathematics education needs to reach all learners.