CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY IN MATHEMATICS: A CRITICAL NEED | Shelly Jones | TEDxCCSU

good evening and thank you to Jesse Turner and John Foshay for inviting me here tonight and I thank you all for coming math is cultural that's not a question it just says let's do an experiment this is the scenario I'm in otavalo Ecuador and I don't speak Spanish and the vendor doesn't speak English but I want six oranges so I want everyone in the audience to show me six with your fingers hold them up in the air let's see how you show six Wow look around see the variety so we have six this way and we have six this way and we even have six this way in Zulu you can put your hands down in Zulu six literally means take the thumb in Tanzania and Western and Rwanda in Western Tanzania you might even see six this way and I know some people had this and they wondered yes I saw you a okay as it turns out finger gestures are very cultural in nature and if you think about it counting is one of the most basic things one of the most basic mathematics activities that a culture can do well today I'm going to talk about culturally relevant pedagogy in terms of mathematics right so culturally relevant pedagogy teaching is a pedagogy that empowers students and empowers them intellectually socially emotionally and politically and I really like that one by using cultural reference to impart knowledge skills and attitudes first of all students come to school to learn we know that but we also know as educators that what students learn in the classroom is not all there is Johanna Hayes our Teacher of the Year and she's from Waterbury Connecticut she really believes that it takes more than what you do in the classroom and so I agree with that and I think most educators know that Gloria ladson-billings says culturally relevant teaching has three criteria one is is that students have academic success so it's not enough for the access we need the attainment to that students have cultural competence but let's face it we are also hearing that teachers need cultural competence as well and finally that children develop a critical consciousness we have to help students and this is where the politically comes in we have to help students understand and be empowered to challenge the status quo lots and billions goes on to say that schools you sometimes often do not really support culturally different students because they don't provide a social context for learning where students can have access to the knowledge and a comfortable in a familiar way and we heard earlier in a safe way so the question is can we teach mathematics in a way that students can connect to themselves and to their communities and to their identity can we teach in a way that empower students to challenge injustice and most of all can we teach in a way that honors students and their cultural and their intellectual greatness there's a lot being said there so let's think about this if we want to empower students the task in our classroom have to change right so the current curriculum we have is just not gonna do it oh I want to tell you about my young lady there so she participates in a Saturday STEM program and I worked with a group of students there to create clocks for Benjamin Banneker day and that particular day they were able to use mathematics equations to go around the hands of the clock and also just to show their artistic side and she of course is very artistic so Geneva gay says that every student has a strength every student does something well and that's what we have to start with so here are some real life stories if we want to connect the students these are some of the things that we could do these are researchers that do that do math for social justice and culturally relevant math bill Tate worked with the teacher to do a project with students to sort of learn about their community and what they wanted to do was to count the number of liquor stores in their neighborhood and they did that they took a walk around their community and then they took the bus to the suburban community and they counted the number of liquor stores or package stores if we want to say it nicely in that neighborhood and they found out to their surprise that there were a lot more liquor stores in their neighborhood and so they wrote their City Council there's the politically again right so when I first started teaching I I didn't know about that word politically I said that's not my place but what I'm learning is that it is my place and so anyway these students wrote a letter to their City City Council and they asked to close 13 liquor stores that were in 1,000 feet of their school how they know that they did the research so students are learning and they're dealing with issues from their community and they're using math they use percentages decimals and fractions to make their case to the City Council and they were successful somewhat not totally they didn't close 13 liquor stores but they were somewhat successful the other picture with the quilts a Jacqueline Leonard and her colleagues worked with fourth-grade teachers in Philadelphia and they wanted to incorporate culturally relevant teaching and their reading and in their math classroom and so what they did was they made quilts so the students were able to be artistic they were able to tell the story because a quote tells the story about your life so they were able to talk about themselves and the teacher in fact learned a lot about the students that she didn't already know the other thing is they learn area and perimeter so we're still doing the math right when Gloria ladson-billings said we have to have academic success she didn't mean we were going to do culturally relevant math and dumb down the math we're still gonna do math that is complex that gets students thinking and also that sort of hit the standards whatever those might be because all teachers have to think about that the last picture shows corn rolls and I had a colleague talk to me about a week ago and she had a math lesson that she wanted to do that involved corn rolls and she has an african-american female student in her classroom well she didn't feel it was her place to just pick that particular student out so she emailed the whole class and said do you know anyone that knows how to do corn rolls and would they mind speaking to our class low and behold that student thought come enough to leave that class discussion and this was a student who normally would sit in the back of the room and not be engaged and so the teacher told me that story because she was really happy about it but also she tried something new she did a math lesson about corn rolls and there's actually a book it's called math as a verb and it has a full lesson on just corn rolls and there's of course other culturally relevant lessons in there as well so we're always trying to connect to our students and so my colleagues and I created or put forth a framework for culturally relevant cognitively demanding math tasks and what we did was we started with the literature on culturally relevant teaching and then we added in the literature on cognitively demanding tasks mary-kate Stein and her colleagues helped us with that and from that we were able to come up with a framework that could assist teachers in making culturally relevant lessons and so this is one of the tasks that teachers create it and I loved it I thought of the students I used to teach right away because I thought of tagging and I thought of Christmas graffiti but one of the things that the teachers learned was that a task is not culturally relevant in itself it depends on the students so for me this was culturally relevant for my students but for another colleague they didn't feel it was culturally relevant at all and by the way this particular task gets at domain and range it gets at graphing on a coordinate plane it gets that ratio and proportion and using a scale factor in order to reduce sorry reduce our or enlarge the picture so how do we move forward so teachers trying to find resources that would help them to create culturally relevant mathematics tasks they could look at Bob Moses he talks about math being a civil rights issue and what he talked about was how algebra has been a gatekeeper and how even in the car at the college level how some students have to take algebra two and three times in order to graduate college so it is indeed still a gatekeeper it keeps some students from really reaching their goals and then we have other people like Gloria ladson-billings who talked about teachers that were successful with african-american students and then we talked about Peterson and guts teen or gutes teens scuse excuse my pronunciation who talked about math for social justice and and they have a lesson in their book called buying a home while black or brown I love it it's for high school students and they get to read statistics about what is really happening when people go out and purchase try to purchase a home depends on the neighborhood right and then finally I have a math and culture and popular media and I like that resource by Chappell and Thompson excuse me I like that resource because it brings in popular media and so we can watch a clip from a movie like The Pursuit of Happyness and she has lessons to go with that and so how will you move forward and I and this is what I say to you to move forward this is what you want to do you want to remember what cred Dotson says he says in our classroom we don't teach math we teach children just think about that we teach children we want to empower them we want them to be academically successful we want them to be culturally competent and so we think of all of these things and there was one slide that I want to go back to because I do have one more minute and I just wanted to say that we also created a rubric to help teachers assess the level of cultural relevance so for instance in one of the characteristics of a culturally relevant tasks you have students will critique Society well we don't do that very much in math and it's actually okay that we don't but maybe we want to do it sometimes or one of the one of the characteristics is that we use students knowledge in in knowledge of their community and math lessons and so these are some of the tools that teachers can use to help them create culturally relevant math tasks to use culturally relevant math tasks and to engage students give them an entry point into math because as we know math is cultural thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 54,352

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Math

Id: EjLOuUhN6xY

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016