Hello!

We are so excited you are here. We are in the first year of our project and welcome all feedback/questions/comments/etc. We also posed some questions to kick of the discussion

1. What does it mean to connect math to the real world?
2. What are some relevant social and political issues for elementary school?
3. What types of lessons will teachers implement?

Please link to your own work so we can all learn with each other. 

Such an interesting and needed project! I look forward to following over the next few years. I am curious...when you start lesson planning with teachers do you start with a particular mathematical goal (e.g., I want my students to be confronted with a situation involving equivalent fractions) or with a community issue to explore and then try to make the mathematics "fit"?

Great question! I would say we've done some of both so far (and that there's a lot of back and forth within any given conversation). In one case we had a general real-world topic to begin with, but were able to adapt it to different mathematical goals. In some conversations the teachers might have ideas for contexts and then we try to brainstorm mathematical connections. I haven't been involved in a lot of conversations where we start only with the math topic and go from there, but I think that will come up more next year (and it's come up as an approach in more general conversations with the teachers).

Ana, thanks for checking in. We are examining both ways. Realistically teachers will need to start with the math they are required to teach and build connections from there, so we are definitely examining that route. In addition learning about the children and the communities can help us with the contexts that might be relevant to them. I just watched your video and would love to learn more and potentially connect our work. 

What a powerful way to have children engage in meaningful learning experiences in mathematics. I'm interested in how you all think about making connections to science, engineering, and social studies with this project. 

Love this question. I will say that these cross curriculuar connections have been coming up this year in our work with practicing elementary teachers while we are developing tasks. In these conversations, there have been more connections to science and social studies and less connections to engineering, so I appreciate the reminder to also attend to other content areas.

This is an important topic for educational research and I'm excited to learn more as you continue with your work. Does your study include directly engaging with the students to learn about their reactions to the lessons? 

Hi Jennifer, yes we are working in schools with teachers and students. So exciting to see what will happen. 

What a great project! I like how students created different kinds of representations of the same data. I'm sure that encouraged them to look at things from various perspectives. As a museum educator and researcher, I am inspired to think about how we might incorporate data representation into people's experiences of our individual exhibitions or even holistically across the museum.

Very nice presentation and project! Will you discuss more how you are measuring impacts of your project? What is your methodology? Dispositions was mentioned as an important variable. What aspect of dispositions are you looking at and how are you determining changes in disposition due to the project? Thanks much!!

Great project! I'm curious about what role students will have in generating topics to explore with math. Are you developing topics and projects based mostly on teacher input about what might work with different age groups or populations? Or will you create projects that are responsive to and adaptable to specific student groups?

Connecting mathematics to the real world is critical! Thank you for sharing.

This project looks so amazing. I really love the focus on real world mathematics connections and the example of the world as a village. I worry, sometimes, that we're in a world in which social and political issues are often divided into a binary of "for" or "against". But to children, issues are much more nuanced and complex. I wonder if there are ways to engage in social and political issues using mathematics to show that there is more than just a "for" or "against" stand for children to take.

This effort sounds great. Helping students see the math that is all around us will increase the relevance of math courses for the rest of their lives. In science we are trying to do this by building lessons around science phenomena. I am sure you could do something similar for a lot of math topics. 

Brian, I couldn't agree more. In our case we are looking at social and political phenomena as well as mathematical content. I've seen some amazing work in science with a similar approach. Thanks for watching our video.