An Avenue to Equity in Mathematics Education

In the paper “Building on Community Knowledge: An Avenue to Equity in Mathematics Education” Marta Civil described her personal experience of teaching mathematics in low-income families: its possibilities and limitations, its failures and successes.  The author has been involved in FKT (Funds of Knowledge for Teaching) project for several years. One of the main purposes of this project was to develop teaching practises in low-income neighbourhoods through collaboration between university researchers and elementary school teachers. Namely, teachers tried to research community of their students and specific knowledge of their families, and consequently tried to implement that context and those facts in the math classrooms.

Civil was involved in implementing several learning modules to the elementary school, such as: currency, construction and garden. All of these modules were based on suggestion that both students and their parents are familiar with these concepts that are seems to play an important role in their everyday lives. During Civil’s involvement in that FRT project she has been asking the same question to every learning module: “Where is the mathematics?” For example, how could we enrich learning module on currency with mathematics? Could we estimate math competencies of students by using such question as “How do you build a house?”?   In other words, she was wondering whether mathematics is lost or “watered” down in over-contextualised themes.

That paper provides us with successful example of involving parents as direct contributors to the curriculum in low-income neighbourhoods. Namely, the garden module was the most successful because it was able to engage both the community in the learning process and students to mathematically rich situations.  Summing up, that paper showed us possibilities of implementing “real” experience of the community in the math classrooms and demonstrated us importance of constructing trust relationship with students’ families through this approach.

As for me, the most interesting issue in this paper was a search for connection between school mathematics and its implementing to “real-life” situations. Namely, I am concerned that students do really need school mathematics in such contextualised problems. For example, it was shown in Elza Fernandez’s paper (Rethinking success and failure in mathematics learning: The role of participation) that blacksmith students hardly need use the mathematics they learn in school while working as blacksmith. From one point of view, in this case the problem was that school mathematics wasn’t recognised as being the same as that involved in the blacksmith activity. And therefore we again encounter with students’ beliefs about school mathematics and word problems. But from the other point of view, some school mathematics is really irrelevant to blacksmith activity: 

“He [blacksmith students] also said that in blacksmith practise he did not need to do such calculations; he just had to build the object”