Social Justice & Mathematics
Sumona Roy was our guest speaker for the night and gave us many different ideas to incorporate math into other areas of the Ontario curriculum with specific reference to social justice and mathematics combined together.
Minds On - Waste Art
Sumona taught us to incorporate social justice and the environment into our regular mathematics lessons in order to promote student engagement. Lots of students love talking about social justice but aren’t as fond of math. The trick is to get them into liking math through expiring the theme of social justice. She used her website: http://socjusmath.wikispaces.com/ to show us different Minds On activities that included the different zoomed in photos of pollution and recycling waste and how the mathematics is absolutely amazing behind how much waste we throw away each year, month, day, hour, and even minute! I can’t wait to show this to my students when I’m back teaching mathematics one day.
Principles for Teaching Social Justice
Principle 1: enable significant work within communities of learners - if you engage students in meaningful work, you’ll have engaged students in mathematics. When you make the math real and bring it into their world is when the most learning happens.
Principle 2: build on what students bring to school with them - knowledge and interest, cultural and linguistic resources - all students have talents and are knowledgeable or have a passion in different areas. It’s up to you as their teacher to find their passion, find out what their background is and run with it. Use that to capture their attention in teaching all areas, not just math, and you’ll have students who want to learn more.
Principle 3: teach skills and bridge gaps that your students bring with them - Knowing ahead of time that all students come into your class with gaps, helps you to get the balling going with finding out what their specific gaps are. Key Math and other testing forms like ONAP help with this.
Principle 4: work with (not against) individuals, families, and communities - these people are your best resource to helping you with teaching mathematics to students. You have your students for half of their day, parents have them for the other half. Getting their input and the community input on services already available to help you will help lessen your load and reinforce ideas already taught to students.
Principle 5: diversify your forms of assessment - use different ways of assessment interviews, tests, show and share, art forms, etc to get a better idea of a well rounded student.
iPad Apps
Sumona also talked about using technology to incorporate mathematics with your students. Two different apps she mentioned as useful in her teaching are:
Explain Everything and Educreations
Both of these apps are amazing for documenting student work and giving students the opportunity to tell you about their mathematical thinking. This is great for students who aren’t necessarily the best at writing their thought process but are better articulating their mathematical thinking orally instead. This way we can more accurately assess all students.
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