Cultivating a Space for Critical Mathematical Inquiry through Knowledge-Eliciting Mathematical Activity

Source abstract

Learning mathematics becomes more effective when teachers leverage their students' mathematical and everyday knowledge as resources for instruction. Thus, tasks that reveal these forms of knowledge would be especially useful to teachers. Unfortunately, such tasks are hard to find and even harder to create. Consequently, we developed a collection of mathematical tasks that we hoped would elicit “children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases (i.e., the understandings and experiences that have the potential to shape and support children’s mathematics learning—including children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s cultural, home, and community-based knowledge)” (Turner et al., 2012, p. 68). These tasks proved to be productive and took on two forms, one of which called on students to provide mathematical and real-world justifications for decisions, and one of which used a community issue as a “contextual scaffold” for linking students’ community- and school-based knowledge.