Matt Inquires About Mathematics (EDUC 450B)

Today, our group worked on a google slide document putting together the structure of our presentation: Introduction, Why teach Climate Change, Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), Community reflection from our conversations with SA’s and other teachers, Literature Review, Interactive activity and bibliography. We seem to be making good progress towards completing the inquiry project. I am grateful for having time during EDUC 450 scheduled time to work on this project as I am swamped with other projects that have to be completed outside of class time. Goals for next week would be to meet with Susan to discuss our work so far and get suggestions on next steps/things to improve or edit.

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eqc2nCinnKyeA1cpZ8EP8V1oNT327z98YOUEI9Fzsdg/edit?usp=sharing

Draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eqc2nCinnKyeA1cpZ8EP8V1oNT327z98YOUEI9Fzsdg/edit?usp=sharing

Today, our group pieced together more literature papers, videos, and resources to total our 16 sources for the bibliography. We also found a few interesting ideas to use for the interactive activity portion of our project.  The next steps for our project was to distribute the papers so we each had some to read and summarize for the annotated bibliography but also have information we could include in our mini-lit review and findings for our project. We each agreed to find a person to speak to, for making connections of our project to real world teaching and learning. My contact person would probably be my SA or a connection I have who is currently a math/science teacher who is involved in school gardening and other environmental initiatives.

The biggest take-away I have from today’s discussion on ‘trusting science’ and using rigorous scientific methods to check facts and theories is to have an open mind and be willing to listen to/consider alternative theories presented. Science may not often be “set in stone” as there might be new advances in the future; science is continually evolving and being built upon. In mathematics, proofs are an excellent way to help build ‘trust’ in understanding why theorems work. However, it can be possible that there are flaws in the proofs and may ultimately change its understanding. A great example of keeping open minds for creativity and new ways of understanding is to welcome “fresh perspectives from new minds.” A person completely new to a field enter without any biases or previous knowledge and can contribute alternative views of the topic.

In Bavelas’ paper, she discusses ways to be creative and curious when conducting research. One thing she mentions is to not dismiss hunches you might have about a topic. She mentions the “Zeigarnik effect” which occurs when interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed tasks. I did not know that this phenomenon had a name, as I have experienced it many times. One example of it could be in classrooms where students study/remember material for a test and forget everything after writing the test. As educators, we need to work towards creating lessons that are memorable and stay with students longer than just a few months. One way to do this could be to let them choose topics that interest them and conduct research on their own, or teach topics that are relevant to the world around them such as those in current events. Bavelas (1987) suggests that researchers develop a schema or class when exploring one’s own thoughts and hunches. She says that, “once you begin to have a critica...