Pedagogical Philosophy
The inclusion of demographic information should not lead the reader to believe they have a complete picture of the school community at Johnson. While 82% of students fall in the “at-risk” category, 100% of students can learn when they receive the appropriate supports, both academically and socio-emotionally. Bob Moses and Charles Cobb, largely known for their SNCC activism and leadership, argue in Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights that due to its connection to economic freedom, math literacy is the key to the future for disenfranchised people of color, and that the pursuit of that literacy is as vital as was the fight for voting rights in the 1960s. Boutte argued in Educating African American Students, “there has been an overemphasis on what is wrong with Black students and communities…the intent is to focus on what we as educators can change and what strengths already exist that we may build on.”[1] Bearing this responsibility in mind as an educator, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) will be foremost in guiding the Representation Matters unit. This pedagogical approach makes space for the diversity of strengths among students within the subgroup. Further, it emphasizes meeting students where they are to provide context for building understanding but not staying at that level in perpetuity.
Moses also argues for a culturally relevant pedagogical approach which starts where children are in Radical Equations. Moses recommends a framework that causes students to reflect on their shared experiences, but in his framework, the educator can create a shared experience with a physical event that can reveal something about math. Following the event, students will draw “on their common culture, then form abstract conceptualizations out of their reflection, and then apply the abstraction back on their experience.”[2] This process affords students the opportunity to grapple with what they know and come to new understandings, while being open to learning from others. Students must connect with the material to internalize it and transfer their learning in novel situations. In the DC Public Schools district, the use of Stanford University’s Math Language Routines (MLRs) is encouraged to promote student concept internalization. Cobb and Moses similarly recognize the importance of students being able to represent their internalization of learning through language. They describe the following steps as crucial to the learning process: a physical event, pictorial representation/modeling, intuitive language/people talk, structured language/feature talk, and symbolic representation. The placement of pictorial representation and intuitive talk (a student’s everyday language) at the early stages of the process provides entry points for students who are resistant to diving straight into the math. In fact, they assert that students should feel ownership over their descriptions in these two stages. After achieving some success in the earlier stages with building context, students will be better prepared to ask and answer questions that can be answered by math application.
In the Representation Matters unit, students will learn to represent data they observe in various ways; with the educator legitimizing both the ways in which students express the data intuitively and the ways their presentations change as they uncover new forms of representation.
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