Course Reflection Post

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 A big theme of this class for me was moving away from the traditional "teacher lectures and students do homework" format of a math classroom to a more holistic approach and gaining strategies to do so. One of the pieces we looked at that was highly influential for me was the Jo Boaler video. It seemed like such an obvious concept - that our focus in math needs to switch from computational to real-world/meaningful problems - but she just presented all the information and research in such a clear way that it is still with me. Another very influential reading/presentation we watched was Dr. Robin Kimmerer's work. As I am still navigating and learning more about Indigenous Perspectives, I find myself referring back to her braid metaphor for ways of knowing quite frequently. Sustainability in math is still a little overwhelming for me, however, I have been able to gain some insights during other courses and also by tying it back to Indigenous Perspectives. Specifically, I found the idea of teaching math as a part of a whole, as opposed to an isolated subject helpful in finding a way to introduce sustainability, at least a little bit at a time, as I myself explore the topic. Other helpful methods of teaching we talked about were embodying math, the effects of marking, which we talked about in other classes as well so it was nice to have complementary material and gain a deeper understanding of these topics as well.

In terms of suggestions for next month, I'm not sure if this is really a topic or not, but I would be interested in finding out more about assigning less traditional assignments/projects to students. For example, we talked about Mike Naylor's math novel, and my SA had me read The Curious Case of the Dog at Nighttime in which the main character often described his thinking or events using mathematical puzzles or concepts. It would be interesting to hear from teachers who have assigned novels as readings, creative writing math pieces, or other things not typically assigned in math classrooms and how they explicitly tied that to the course or emphasized the mathematical importance along the way.

Inquiry Project Reflection Post

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 Here are the slides for Amrit's and my inquiry project:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-reZ5v1zqvOBf-ijZqi2-QvIw1j9RFKeBb3mE_-J62w/edit#slide=id.p

Through the course of researching this topic, I was met with quite a few surprises. First of all, I hadn't realized how many teachers were using the FNESC textbook. Because it has been a short amount of time since the book was published, I anticipated not being able to collect a lot of information on the effectiveness of its usage. However,  I hadn't thought about looking into Indigenous knowledge implementation from around the world until we started doing our research. 

We discovered that a lot of similarities between the struggles Indigenous students faced here and in places like Australia and Africa. Through reading on the strategies used in other parts of the world, we were able to find methods that would help us in our own classrooms. In addition to this, we did find some instances of successful integration of Indigenous Perspectives in Canadian classrooms as well as what we should avoid (or what is less effective). I am glad that we were able to find a lot of resources and starting places for integrating Indigenous Perspectives into our classrooms and I hope to delve deeper into them through the continuation of our Inquiry project.