The three articles this week provided different approaches for teaching for social justice. Each has clarified some issues for me and raised more questions.
I like the specific details that Gutstien provides (especially in Rethinking Mathematics 2006) and I am starting to gaining comfort to raising what could be controversial issues in my classes. The three ideas that stand out to me are (p 55):
- Students need a space to pose their own meaningful questions
- Students aren’t used to posing their own questions; teachers need to seed the process
- Students need the opportunity to name their own realities- I think this means to that students need to identify things in their own environment that hinder their success, so that the students can make informed choices and choose to act in ways that might bring more success.
Gutstein provides strong evidence that his students developed the critical questioning stance that he desires for his students but I wonder about other measures of success. For example his students discussed whether institutional racism results in a lesser rate of blacks and browns getting mortgages, and make the distinction between income and wealth, but does the class build the knowledge of what it takes to build wealth – ‘to play the banking game’- to meet the banks criteria for a mortgage?
One of my strongest impressions from working with Habitat for Humanity revitalising downtown neighbourhoods is seeing $40,000 cars in front of shacks or apartments with holes in the walls. Cars don’t build wealth. Many habitat affiliates now have classes helping families understand how to maintain houses and build a nest egg.
Also how do students do in future math classes- do they have the skills to take gate-keeper courses like Algebra 1?
The Davis and associates article, in contrast, provides evidence of greatly increased participation in college –prep math courses. I find it interesting that Bob Moses developed a program from his studies in philosophy that has many similarities to current research in cognitive psychology ( see for example http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11101&page=1): start where the kids are, give experiences and link those to the mathematical conventions.
I found this article big on the philosophy and big ideas. As a budding researcher, I really liked the idea of examining classrooms using different lenses, but as a teacher I found little concrete that I could use in my classroom- I did find many internet links to the Flagway Game – http://www.typp.org/flagwaycampaign & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD5KB7iK4CA but I still couldn’t use the activity in a classroom.
The Algebra Project chapter also talked about ways they use to engage students – technology, games, and helping students learn to work. This was reassuring because when we have streaming or segregation by neighbourhoods, these are real challenges, which are often glossed over in some articles. I was struck by the idea of presenting being culturally respected and perhaps a better motivator that working silently. I have little exposure to black culture. I wonder if that is a fair conclusion?
I also noted how they work within those presentations to build leadership skills. It reminded me of Lubienski’s assertion that low SES students may get the most out of classes that explicitly work on problem-solving and communication.
What I liked most about Marta Civil’s chapter is the respect for the parents/ communities knowledge. I remember as a student feeling like teachers’ had little respect for the local community and how people lived. However, I need to think about what incorporating family knowledge would look like in a secondary classroom in the community where I live.
Integrating home identity and academic identity
ReplyDelete"What I liked most about Marta Civil’s chapter is the respect for the parents/ communities knowledge."
I completely agree with you there, DT! I really appreciated the fact that Civil focused on the contributions made by adults in the community. By bringing in parents of students who would usually be relegated to the periphery of education into the classroom and drawing on their expertise, it showed the students that their home identities do have a huge role to play in their academic identities. This is definitely an important consideration when we teach so many students who feel a push-pull effect between their home lives and their school lives, especially for those students who may feel like their parents do not have much to offer them in terms of academic support due to language barriers, for instance.
However, just as you question how this integration would look in your teaching scenario, it also makes me question how much some parents would be invited to participate or would even want to, based on the type of job they held and how much English they could speak. It seems like the part of the activity that parents could help was with the gardening, for example, but with the math the help came from the graduate students studying math. Is this, then, a true integration of the home community into the academic world? Furthermore, I can't see an activity like this being integrated at the senior math levels (the garden project was at the grade 8 level, was it not? Although I suppose this activity could be integrated into the Grade 10 curriculum when students study optimization). At the secondary level, I’m uncertain as to how big a role Civil envisions parents and community members playing in the teaching of academic mathematics.
Where is the Mathematics?
ReplyDeleteHi DT and Vivian,
I found Marta Civil’s article on Building Communities of Knowledge particularly interesting this week. I agree with both of you on the importance of showing respect for the communities of knowledge and drawing on the expertise of parents (the notion of parents as intellectual resources).
Another reason why I found this article so engaging is because, if I were in her place, I would feel the same uneasiness that Marta expressed in at various points in this process. I have found that when trying something completely different in the classroom it is difficult to feel confident that the learning expectations you have set out will be met and that profound learning will take place. To quote Civil: “Although I believe in the pedagogical approach behind thematic instruction, I am concerned that often the mathematics in those themes is watered down”.(p. 110). She also talks about how in her experience with student-guided curriculum, “the mathematics had not been as strong as [she] would have liked” (p.111) and about the difficulty in setting up an assessment that would measure student’s mathematical learning (p.108)
Sitting students down and telling then what they need to know gives teachers a sense of comfort. We feel we can be sure that the student has learned the key concepts because we have told them what the key concepts are. When we let students out in the real world, how can we be sure that they will learn anything?
But when all is said and done, students learn much more from projects that have relevance in their everyday lives. Projects where they are forced to think, discuss and plan their course of action, and see a problem through from beginning to end.
Civil quotes Millroy’s paradox: “How can anyone who is schooled in conventional Western mathematics ‘see’ any form of mathematics other than that which resembles the conventional mathematics with which she is familiar?” (p. 110). The most natural thing to do when teaching is to fall back on the way you have been taught. It takes a lot of courage and determination (and acceptance of the possibility of failure) to try something new for the benefit of your students.
Hi everyone,
ReplyDeleteI have to confess although I found these chapters fascinating and inspiring, I also found them daunting. Rohini, the quotation you posted from Millroy (Civi's chapter) really hit my difficulty on the head! I agree that we definitely teach the way we were taught because more than likely it was successful for us, so why shouldn't it be successful for our students. That is exactly the way I began my teaching career. I have slowly, but surely, change the way I teach because I discovered, especially after my time in NZ, that not all students think the way I do, ask questions the way I did or do their homework consistently the way I did as well. These days students question a lot more about why they are learning what they are learning and where will this math be useful in their lives. To answer these questions, I have struggled somewhat. Sometimes because they are certain topics which we delve into so briefly that full meaning way not be accessible (nor in fact applicable to their lives), and other times, I just feel so rushed to get everything done in the time allotted, that to create projects that might make the math more meaningful for them takes up more time than I can provide. It really becomes a question of balance I believe.
Also, I share the same concern that D T and Vivian brought up about how could we integrate "parents as intellectual resources" (Civil, pg. 117) or community based projects into upper grades classroom? There must be resources out there for teachers to use, but finding them, adapting them and using them accordingly could be a challenge. I think the greatest thing to create is a professional learning community that has teachers sharing these kinds of projects, but for grade 9 -12. I would think with the accessibility of the Net, this community is out there, we just need to find them and starting a collaboration. I believe it was Civil who said that teachers need resources (parents, community members, math educators, apprentices) to ensure we have projects that do connect to students lives. We need to find a way to tap into these resources more easily.
I hope we have time to talk about this tonight! I think about these issues a lot...
ReplyDeleteSometimes I feel like I'm selling out when I don't tackle things head on, and at other times I think I'm being smart to protect myself as a new teacher or a pre-tenure professor.
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteThis is Marta Civil- I just read your comments very quickly. Give me some time to reflect on them. You all raise very important points related to what it means to engage parents in mathematics education, and particularly at the high school level.
This week has been a bit busier than usual and thus I don't have the blocks of time that I normally have on Thursdays and Fridays. I may not be able to get back to you till the weekend. But I will...
Where is the math? continues to be a question I often raise. My work with parents and community knowledge has evolved over the years; while in the garden unit, it is correct that the parents did not contribute as much to the curriculum / content, in other projects we did have more parent contribution along the lines of content. The closest to a secondary level implementation is the one of one of the former teachers in the Bridge project, Jose David Fonseca who developed an architectural unit, very mathematically rich, with his middle school (8th grade) students. He based the unit on questionnaires in which he found out that many parents of his students were involved in construction. However, getting back to the points raised in your comments, I am not sure he directly involved the parents in the unit; it was more about finding a theme with which his students (and their parents) would be familiar and validating that knowledge by bringing into the classroom.
ReplyDeleteMy more recent work with parents has focused more on developing a dialogue with them about their perceptions about the teaching and learning of mathematics by engaging with them in doing mathematics and finding out about their own approaches to math problems.
These dialogues have made it very clear for me the need to respect parents' knowledge. I see a gap between teachers' and parents' perceptions of each other. This is particularly the case in my work with recent immigrant parents, who often bring other ways to do mathematics (particularly at the level of algorithms for arithmetic operations) and expectations about what the teaching and learning should look like. While some of these difference may be considered typical generational differences, I argue that when non-dominant students are involved, they tend to be caught in the middle as their parents' knowledge is often not valued by schools.
To me the most powerful approaches I have used to establishing a dialogue with parents in which I learn FROM them are:
-sustained mathematics workshops with parents, in which the focus is NOT on teaching them the mathematics that their children are learning, but in using that idea as a springboard for dialogue
-Classroom visits with parents, in which they watch a mathematics classroom and then we debrief that visit
Marta, thanks for your thoughtful response!
ReplyDelete