Department:
Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
Project lead:
Dr. Cynthia Nicol
Project members:
Cynthia Nicol, teacher educator UBC
Janice Novakowski, teacher educator UBC and SD 38 Richmond
Amanda Fritzlan, graduate student and instructor UBC
Denise Flick, teacher educator, UBC WKTEP and SD 11 Trail
Grace Point – teacher and graduate student UBC Musqueam
Jessica Silvey – master weaver Coast Salish
Joanne Yovanovich – Principal of Indigenous Education SD 50 Haida Gwaii
Billy Yovanovich – artist, carver Haida Gwaii
Reflection:
What led you to your project/inspired your work? What values and principles guided the development of your project?
Mathematical actions are cultural ways of being in the world, developed with communities learning to survive in, and engage with, particular places. Being mathematical means noticing and studying patterns. Being mathematical develops through intergenerational knowledge and skills that come from mentoring relationships refined over time living in relationship with the land.
The main goal of our proposal is to create curricular resources centering Indigenous perspectives, pedagogies, and experiences that can be used across our mathematics elementary teacher education courses. Working together we draw upon our shared expertise and experience through three contexts: language, weaving, and carving/drawing to emphasize relationships between land, language, and mathematical actions.
What have you learned so far?
We are still underway with our project as it involves working with community members – under pandemic restrictions – we are being guided by the availability of those participating.
Our Haida Gwaii team has gathered some clips of Haida artist Billy Yovanovich and the Haida stories that guide his work – we will together edit the clipswith possible tags to storywork, community, culture and mathematical actions. Our goal is to also include a podcast of some team members discussing how this project could guide their curricular and pedagogical planning as teacher educators.
Our weaving team is in its initial stage. Currently master weaver Jessica Silvey is video documenting some of her own weaving practices while discussing her own noticing of mathematical actions.
We’ve experienced some delays with our language math book that will highlight connections between land, language and mathematics, but there is keen interest in those involved to continue with this aspect of our project.
Although our project continues to be underway we’ve learned the need for patience and flexibility in working with communities and adjusting our expectations during pandemic restrictions. For example, we’ve asked community artists to film themselves using a set of guiding questions. Then we will meet via Zoom to discuss the video and decide together the story to tell with the video clips.
We hope that our written and multi-media resources will be used by mathematics teacher educators, by teacher candidates during their practicums and as they enter the field as practicing teachers, by teachers in classrooms and by communities as they engage in language and math courses.
