I'm in the US and have attended a number of these sessions, including those intended for students. I feel that they have the same underlying problem as the promotion of generic skills in education--unless one has a grasp of the history and culture of a given society, then it has no foundation in the real issues. Here, racism is a real thing, but most students (and many educators, for that matter) don't have a strong foundational knowledge of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, etc. Heck, I had a class yesterday where students couldn't identify who was president of the US in 1933! How can we expect them to grapple with heavier issues if they don't know the basics?
Hi Greg, I may have shared this with you before, but this piece brought to my mind a spectacular example of failure of social intervention by well-meaning teachers called
Learning To Fail: Our Journey through Math, Social Justice, Action Research, and Collaboration
in the MERN Journal starting on p. 23.
It documents an attempt to get students in a city school who come from places with serious human rights abuses, to grapple -- in math class -- with those issues and thus promote healing, harmony, and free unicorn rides.
In their unusually honest report on the disastrous experiment you find them realising that they'd only succeeded in traumatizing some of the kids and could find no evidence of positive outcomes. Gee, one wonders.
The journal, for some reason, has disappeared online, so I have sent you a PDF of the entire volume. As you'll see if you flip through, this is not the only gem in that volume, which deals with math education. Quite a collection!
The Abstract, which softens the blows in the piece considerably:
"This paper tells the story of the experience of three teachers who worked together to implement an action research project within the incorporation of social justice themes in a grade 8 math class. An analysis of classroom observations, student testimony, and student work revealed that the project delivered unexpected results. The authors discuss the reasons for the results, the effect of their collaboration on their teaching practice, and the implications of their work for math instruction, teaching for social justice, and professional learning."
"... unexpected results" does not quite capture what is laid out in the piece. The tone of the abstract suggests a horrifying possibility: that they may be contemplating a repeat of the experiment.
Tidbits from the piece itself:
"students did not report a deeper interest in percentages even though we had connected the subject to their stated interests. What’s worse, the students’ work showed no increase in understanding of the concepts that we were teaching. The only positive finding was that students did become more engaged when they left their interest groups and rejoined their familiar friend groups to share their learning."
"Students told us that the grouping and the questions we asked were major stumbling blocks. Two students in the focus group told us that they had never really had conversations with some of the students in their interest groups. One of our ideas going into the project was that students would connect with others in the class whom they did not know beforehand, because they would discover shared interests in the important topics we were studying. As the students pointed out to us, this was a flawed assumption. Grouping students by common interest with more or less strangers to talk about highly charged topics resulted not in discussion but in quiet discomfort."
"“In the information above, are there any things that surprise or bother you?” one student told us bluntly, “We are used to talking about questions like these in social studies but this is math class.”"
"Our strategy was supposed to work." :-)
But there is a silver lining. You see the teachers/researchers were able to bond.
"The adversity and discomfort created when our results emerged brought us together as professionals. We were all struck by this surprise, and were implicated equally by it. We created this mess together, and cleaning it up was also a job for the group. The bond created by our responsibility to fix things was quite strong."
Hi Ray. The original site for the MERN Journal appears to have lapsed; the link doesn't work. However someone appears to have uploaded this volume here where it can be downloaded:
If you get it from there you can find the article in question
Learning To Fail: Our Journey through Math, Social Justice, Action Research, and Collaboration
– Marc Kuly, Val Mytopher, and Chris Neufeld
on page 23 even though it's listed in the ToC as being on p. 24. It's only an educational journal volume on teaching math what do you expect? They'd be any good with numbers?
Further, the page numbers are clipped in the PDF file. Note this is a problem in the original file, it's not an artifact of compression for Scribd. Because of this it's probably easier to find using the PDF pagination, in which case you'll find it at the bottom of PDF page 25.
Do look at some of the other articles there as you'll find numerous instances in which our leading educationists in Manitoba express negative views bordering on hostility toward actual mathematicians and the potential for their contribution to math education. As background it might help to know that this is a more-or-less indirect reference to myself and Anna Stokke, who founded an initiative by which the mathematical community addressed problematic elements in the math education world. We were public enemy #1 in the local ed schools for a few years and the conference for which this volume is a proceedings was at the height of the tensions.
What's written therein is quite civil in comparison to what was said live from the podiums at the conference, and we got into some lovely exchanges. Initially some of the speakers did not realise mathematicians were present and perhaps they would have chosen their words differently had they known. I was ejected from one of the parallel sessions; when the speaker asked for questions I asked about his "challenge to the mathematics faculty at our universities" from the keynote address he had just given. He did not appreciate being put on the spot. Let's just say the discussion that ensued was "lively".
I'm in the US and have attended a number of these sessions, including those intended for students. I feel that they have the same underlying problem as the promotion of generic skills in education--unless one has a grasp of the history and culture of a given society, then it has no foundation in the real issues. Here, racism is a real thing, but most students (and many educators, for that matter) don't have a strong foundational knowledge of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, etc. Heck, I had a class yesterday where students couldn't identify who was president of the US in 1933! How can we expect them to grapple with heavier issues if they don't know the basics?
Hi Greg, I may have shared this with you before, but this piece brought to my mind a spectacular example of failure of social intervention by well-meaning teachers called
Learning To Fail: Our Journey through Math, Social Justice, Action Research, and Collaboration
in the MERN Journal starting on p. 23.
It documents an attempt to get students in a city school who come from places with serious human rights abuses, to grapple -- in math class -- with those issues and thus promote healing, harmony, and free unicorn rides.
In their unusually honest report on the disastrous experiment you find them realising that they'd only succeeded in traumatizing some of the kids and could find no evidence of positive outcomes. Gee, one wonders.
The journal, for some reason, has disappeared online, so I have sent you a PDF of the entire volume. As you'll see if you flip through, this is not the only gem in that volume, which deals with math education. Quite a collection!
The Abstract, which softens the blows in the piece considerably:
"This paper tells the story of the experience of three teachers who worked together to implement an action research project within the incorporation of social justice themes in a grade 8 math class. An analysis of classroom observations, student testimony, and student work revealed that the project delivered unexpected results. The authors discuss the reasons for the results, the effect of their collaboration on their teaching practice, and the implications of their work for math instruction, teaching for social justice, and professional learning."
"... unexpected results" does not quite capture what is laid out in the piece. The tone of the abstract suggests a horrifying possibility: that they may be contemplating a repeat of the experiment.
Tidbits from the piece itself:
"students did not report a deeper interest in percentages even though we had connected the subject to their stated interests. What’s worse, the students’ work showed no increase in understanding of the concepts that we were teaching. The only positive finding was that students did become more engaged when they left their interest groups and rejoined their familiar friend groups to share their learning."
"Students told us that the grouping and the questions we asked were major stumbling blocks. Two students in the focus group told us that they had never really had conversations with some of the students in their interest groups. One of our ideas going into the project was that students would connect with others in the class whom they did not know beforehand, because they would discover shared interests in the important topics we were studying. As the students pointed out to us, this was a flawed assumption. Grouping students by common interest with more or less strangers to talk about highly charged topics resulted not in discussion but in quiet discomfort."
"“In the information above, are there any things that surprise or bother you?” one student told us bluntly, “We are used to talking about questions like these in social studies but this is math class.”"
"Our strategy was supposed to work." :-)
But there is a silver lining. You see the teachers/researchers were able to bond.
"The adversity and discomfort created when our results emerged brought us together as professionals. We were all struck by this surprise, and were implicated equally by it. We created this mess together, and cleaning it up was also a job for the group. The bond created by our responsibility to fix things was quite strong."
That's interesting. Can you post a link to the pdf?
Hi Ray. The original site for the MERN Journal appears to have lapsed; the link doesn't work. However someone appears to have uploaded this volume here where it can be downloaded:
https://www.scribd.com/document/392104870/MERN-Journal-V07-2013
If you get it from there you can find the article in question
Learning To Fail: Our Journey through Math, Social Justice, Action Research, and Collaboration
– Marc Kuly, Val Mytopher, and Chris Neufeld
on page 23 even though it's listed in the ToC as being on p. 24. It's only an educational journal volume on teaching math what do you expect? They'd be any good with numbers?
Further, the page numbers are clipped in the PDF file. Note this is a problem in the original file, it's not an artifact of compression for Scribd. Because of this it's probably easier to find using the PDF pagination, in which case you'll find it at the bottom of PDF page 25.
Do look at some of the other articles there as you'll find numerous instances in which our leading educationists in Manitoba express negative views bordering on hostility toward actual mathematicians and the potential for their contribution to math education. As background it might help to know that this is a more-or-less indirect reference to myself and Anna Stokke, who founded an initiative by which the mathematical community addressed problematic elements in the math education world. We were public enemy #1 in the local ed schools for a few years and the conference for which this volume is a proceedings was at the height of the tensions.
What's written therein is quite civil in comparison to what was said live from the podiums at the conference, and we got into some lovely exchanges. Initially some of the speakers did not realise mathematicians were present and perhaps they would have chosen their words differently had they known. I was ejected from one of the parallel sessions; when the speaker asked for questions I asked about his "challenge to the mathematics faculty at our universities" from the keynote address he had just given. He did not appreciate being put on the spot. Let's just say the discussion that ensued was "lively".
Thank you very much!!