Practice One: Immersing in Human Math Worlds
Teachers and students are immersed in exploring mathematical worlds that emerge from personal, community, and cultural origins. By connecting school mathematics with lived realities, teachers foster curiosity, joy, and agency, empowering students to explore, challenge, and create new mathematical worlds that reflect their identities, communities, and worldviews.
A Culturally Responsive Mathematics Teaching Approach: Practice One
Course contents
Every Child Creates Math Worlds Worth Exploring
Every child has a mathematical world to explore, rich with experiences, activities, and insights that are deeply connected to the communities they belong to.
Whether it’s the designs they make in nature, the patterns they incorporate, the reasoning with family, the calculations or the problem-solving involved in navigating daily tasks, these worlds are filled with mathematical potential. By tapping deeply into these personal and cultural experiences, we can help students understand math as a tool for exploring, understanding, and shaping their world.
Whether it’s the designs they make in nature, the patterns they incorporate, the reasoning with family, the calculations or the problem-solving involved in navigating daily tasks, these worlds are filled with mathematical potential. By tapping deeply into these personal and cultural experiences, we can help students understand math as a tool for exploring, understanding, and shaping their world.
3 Ways to Explore the Cultural Math Worlds of Children
Every student’s mathematical world is deeply rooted in their culture, community, and identity. By recognizing and exploring the math that emerges from these worlds, we can make mathematics more engaging, relevant, and empowering. Here are three practical ways to immerse yourself in these rich, culturally grounded mathematical experiences:
1 Observe and Participate in a Cultural, Community, or Family Event
Begin by immersing yourself in the real-world experiences of your students by observing or participating in a cultural, community, or family event. Pay close attention to the activities, interactions, and tasks happening around you. Whether it’s a family gathering, a local celebration, or a community event, look for the ways in which people use math naturally—through measurements, patterns, budgeting, or problem-solving or debating.
2 Ask Questions, But Remember: Language Matters
When learning from cultural communities and it’s important to acknowledge that people don’t usually use formal math language in everyday life like teachers are trained to use. School math terms and vocabulary can be limited. For example, asking children to only name shames that match rectangles, circles and squares eliminates the vast variety of irregular and nonconforming shapes found in cultures, natures and communities. Noticing and learning culturally requires affirming and understanding the personal and cultural ways and language people use to express how math is experience (yet in nonmathy ways).
instead of: “What geometric pattern do you see?”
try: “How do you think the leaves are placed to get the most sunlight? What do you notice about how they grow?”
3 Build Bridges to the School Curriculum Using What We Learn
The next step is to build opportunities for students to connect their cultural math experiences with school math curriculum. The key is to transpose shared experiences from students and their communities as critical points for engaging formal school math concepts.
Introduce technical vocabulary, algorithms and constructs alongside cultural thinking and practices, and the math embedded within, showing students that the math they experience in their lives is often connected to the math they learn in school.
For example, after discussing how leaves grow to maximize sunlight (aStep 2), you might transition the concept of symmetry or having students notice angles in plant growth patterns, connecting this observation to geometry in the curriculum.
7 Creative Activities to Connect Algebra with Students’ Lives and Communities
Here are seven teacher activities to make algebra meaningful and relevant to students by connecting it to their daily experiences, cultural backgrounds, and community needs.
15 Math Ideas to Expore Culturally with Students
Try this AI Prompt for Learning more about Community Mathematics
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