Matt Inquires About Mathematics (EDUC 450B)

 Inquiry III Project with Amrit, Ivan, Karishma, Tyler and myself.  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YpH7AOGeHvqolhrurZzecJ2SWV4EScztUAzV-lbxEeI/edit?usp=sharing

Link to our slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bDJHtZL9BQwDMhn2-PH8_mP1kN1fD6aFyqrt2l7BjlQ/edit?usp=sharing Reflection: In this inquiry project, I learned a lot about the benefits of realistic mathematics education and developed many ideas how to teach mathematics with application to environmental education and climate change. I am inspired by the idea of teaching math outdoors in an outdoor amphitheater or garden space. I love being outside and hope it also can be valuable to students to help them retain information better; as shown in the literature. From my personal experience as a high school student many years ago, I enjoyed being part of the garden and working to build our school orchard garden from the ground up. I hope I get an opportunity to be the educator to help lead something like this in the future. This interest of mine leads me to see if I can develop a club or program where my students can take on environmental education initiatives in the school, such...

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.

 For this topic, I will work with Ivan and Tyler thinking about making connections between climate change and mathematics.  I wanted to conduct my inquiry project surrounding the topic of environmental education in mathematics because I am very interested in sustainability and environmental economics. This interest began in high school when I took on lead in the school composting program and was involved in building our school orchard from the group up. Problem-solving and critical thinking skills from mathematics were essential to my success on these projects, however, I wished there were lessons in math class that explicitly touched on these topics. During my undergrad I took courses in urban studies, environmental psychology, forestry economics and economics of non-renewable resources, which I think have some interesting ideas to incorporate in a math classroom.