Unexpected Implications of Project

Photo: Students working on Iraq War group math project

Gutstein (2006) wrote that the following of the importance of a social justice pedagogy: "students themselves are ultimately part of the solution to injustice, both as youth and as they grow into adulthood" (p. 39). The unexpected implication of my social justice based math program was just that, my students developed into critical citizens who both wanted to discuss social justice issues and wanted to share their opinions, using the support of mathematics, with others in hopes of being part of the solution.

The student's began to develop a sociopolitical consciousness through discussions that sprang out of math lessons during the social justice based math units. In a teaching journal entry from March 21, 2008 I wrote the following concerning this shift:

Yesterday my students presented their final group projects for their immigration group project (The wall). What was most interesting was the discussions that ensued after presentations. The students were appalled at the cost and had all (seemingly) come to see it as unjust to the people of Mexico and the people living in border towns. I was surprised and gratified by these unexpected and important discussions. The students were really using math to understand a real world social justice issue.

The students engaged in learning about social justice issues and learned how to use mathematics as a tool for understanding and discussing complex real world issues. They began to see math as a valuable tool for understanding the world. In response to the interview question, "How has math helped you understand the world?," June Jacobs stated the following:

Math can help me understand it is because the math shows people and me what the real world is like, how much does this really add up to? You may hear a number of people being killed in Iraq and it doesn't seem as much but then when it's written out there in number form people look at it and say, 'that's ridiculous, that's an insane number, nobody should be dying that much in something like a war.' People pay more attention to it when they see it in that big number that's written out. (personal communication, June 3, 2008)

This shows that she was seeing math as a tool for understanding complex social justice issues. She clearly articulated how analyzing the numbers had helped her and could help others understand the human cost of the Iraq War.

Gutstein, E. (2006). "The real world as we have seen it": Latino/a parents' voices on teaching mathematics for social justice. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 8, 331-358. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ740244)

Specific Results from Student Interviews

The interviews I conducted with my students were fascinating and yielded the overall result of an increase in engagement due to the social justice based mathematics units. What follows are some specific questions I asked in the interviews and the student's responses.

In response to the interview question “What is your favorite way to learn math at school and why?” many students explained that they enjoyed the social justice based math units. Student 1 (personal communication, June 3, 2008) responded as follows:

I liked the group projects. I liked learning about all the different things that is happening around the world. And what we mainly talked about was all the prices and I also liked learning with ST Math and when you plan lessons for us.

Student 3 (personal communication, June 3, 2008) agreed:

My favorite way to learn math is the math group projects. I think those are really fun. I know they take a lot of time up but they are worth it to do because you get to work with other people and you get to research a lot and also using math.

Student 6, Student 10, Student 9, and Student 4 also said that their favorite way to learn math was when they worked in groups during the social justice based math units. Student 6 explained that she liked doing the group projects because “it’s not just me trying to figure it all out. I have people helping me.” Overall, six out of the nine students in my grade math class specifically said that their favorite way to learn math was in the small group projects I used in the social justice mathematics unit. A few also noted that they liked doing the research on the computer during the units.

In response to the interview question “How has your view or opinion of mathematics changed during these two units? Do you like math more or less after doing these two units or the same?” students either reported that they liked math more or that their opinion of math had not changed. One of the students whose opinion of math did not change, student 8 (personal communication, June 3, 2008) said the following: “My view or opinion of math hasn’t changed much because I’ve always been pretty good at math and it can be hard and frustrating at times.” Student 1’s (personal communication, June 3, 2008) opinion had changed and she said, “After the two units I like math more because I learned that you don’t just have to learn about like certain things. You can do a bunch of different things in math.” Student 6 (personal communication, May 29, 2008) also said that she liked math more after the units and gave some reasons for this change:

I think I like math more now because it seems more fun when we do these because you get to talk with your friends about it and it brings up a better discussion like if (Student 4) and I are at recess we would like bring up the discussion of the Iraq War and we’d spend the whole recess talking about that and we’d even come to class and we’d still be talking about it.

Overall, in response to this question 55.5% of the students in my math class stated that they liked math more because of the social justice mathematics units. The other 44.4% stated that their opinions about math had not changed. This shows that a majority of the student’s learned to enjoy math more because of the social justice based mathematics units. This is my best measure of student engagement, if students like math more they are also very likely to be more engaged in math.

The student interviews showed that students were engaged in the social justice mathematics units. The students approved of the units and hoped to do more in the following school year. Their enthusiasm was evident in their interview responses as I conducted the interviews and as I transcribed them.

Rusults Without Surprises

Photo: A student organizes her research on the War in Iraq

The data I collected via student surveys, student interview, student work samples, reflections, my teaching journal, parent surveys, and my professional development reflections revealed that my students were more engaged and more academically proficient in mathematics after the implementation of the two social justice based mathematics units described in earlier posts.

In short, the result of my study is that a Social Justice based mathematics program increases student engagement and achievement in mathematics.

These results were not surprising because it had always seemed obvious to me as a teacher that interesting real world based lessons, activities, and assignments would interest students more than traditional mathematics, which my students clearly did not care for. It also seemed very clear that if I could engage my students, they would learn the math and thus do better academically in mathematics. My results didn't surprise me because it just made sense that what I was doing would have a positive result for my students.

In future posts I will share some of my most interesting data. My students said some insightful things that I could not say better and I want to share them with you, my readers.

Data Collection Techniques

After implementing the two social justice mathematics units during spring 2008 I collected a great deal of data. As I was new to AR I didn't know exactly what would be most relevant so I collected everything I could think of.

To determine whether student's had become more engaged in mathematics I collected the following data:

• Post-survey
• Post-interviews (all students)
• Student work (math notebooks and final group projects)
• Student reflections
• My teaching journal
• My professional development reflections
  
• Parent surveys

To determine whether students were becoming more academically more proficient in mathematics I collected the following data:

• Spring 2008 CST results
• Student grades

In my next post I will talk about some of my most relevant results and the conclusions I was able to draw from them.

The Second Social Justice Based Mathematics Unit: The Iraq War

Photo 1: Map of the Middle East used in lesson during Iraq War unit



Photo 2: Me teaching during Iraq War unit

After completing the unit on immigration, which I promise to talk about more in a later post, I asked my students to brainstorm ideas for our next social justice based mathematics unit. First we talked about what social justice meant and then we did a brainstorm. After coming up with a list of viable ideas students did a blind vote to choose their focus area. They chose the War in Iraq.

My thoughts were that this was a huge topic but that I could guide them in any direction I wanted and that information was likely to be readily available. Once I knew the topic I started designing their group project. I set it up much like the first project on immigration and they had the same group roles that I shared in my last post. I made some changes to the structure for completion of the project. I laid out more specifics on what each student had to do to get their final project grade. I also considered the California state standards that I needed to cover before the end of the year and made plans for lessons to support the standards.

The final project that I asked students to complete in their small groups was as follows:

Overview of Project

1. Each group will conduct research and use mathematics to determine the costs of the War in Iraq, from both a monetary and a human perspective. Students will use mathematics (graphs, tables, ratios, percentages, etc.) to calculate and display the costs of war (both monetary and human). Groups should look at the costs from both the perspective of the Unites States and Iraq.
   
2. The groups will research, discuss, calculate and display the costs of the War in Iraq in comparison to other governmental costs (schools, healthcare, social security, etc.).
   
3. The groups must create their own budget for the United States. They should both show their budget in a visual display and explain why they believe their choices for allocating the taxpayers money is of high quality and should be adopted.
   

Final Project

The final project must include writing, art, and math. It can be done in the form of a PowerPoint, PhotoStory, Movie, or with a poster board and oral presentation. It can also be a combination of all of the above options. Please be creative in how you present the information you collect and prepare. If you have another idea for how to present your group's work let me know and we can discuss it as an option. There must be an oral or interactive component in the presentation. The presentation must address all three areas of focus and be of high quality.

Grades

Grades will depend upon both the group's final presentation and each student's individual work in their math notebook. Each student will receive two grades: one for their individual contributions and the other for the group's final project.

The students were very excited about this project because it was a topic of their choice. They really wanted to know about the War in Iraq. I worked very hard throughout this unit, as I had in the last, to include multiple perspectives. This was particularly important because I quickly determined that most or all of my students were against the war in Iraq. I made it my mission to bring in other perspectives during the unit. It wasn't hard. In fact, I'd say it was very fun! I'll share more about this later.

Group Work Structure

Photo 1: Students during a lesson during the immigration unit.

Photo 2: Group work.

During the social justice based math units I wanted each student in each group of three to be contributing an equitable amount of work. To this end I created a group structure that included three specific jobs. The students chose their jobs at the beginning of each of the two social justice based math units. The reason I chose this structure was that I read research showing that group work is only effective when it is deliberately and carefully structured. Students were expect4ed to hold regular group meetings. I attended many of their group meetings and gave them periodic grades on what I saw at these meetings. The grades I gave were based on their level of active participation in their groups process.

The group structure I used is as follows:

Leader: Organizes group, focuses and facilitates discussion, and supports other group members in completing their individual and group assignments on time. The leader makes sure all other students are doing their group jobs well and reminds them of duties they are forgetting. At the first group meeting, the leader meets with group to develop the plan for completion of project at the beginning of the project.

Researcher: In charge of researching the finer points of the topic of the project. The researcher uses resources (library, Internet, etc.) to find information about the topic. Other students may do this as well but it is the Researchers job to keep track of what has been learned and explain to the group how it applies to the final project goal. They present their findings and make assignments for future research (to be conducted by themselves or others) at each group meeting. They keep a bibliography of all the sources they use in their math notebook.

Mathematician: The mathematician keeps track of all of the mathematical work involved in the project. They are in charge of seeking outside help (parents, teachers, mathematicians) if needed by the group. They present their findings/progress and make assignments for future mathematical operations at each group meeting. They present their and others progress and needs in this area at each group meeting.

The First Social Justice Based Mathematics Unit

Photo: Student work in math journal from immigration unit.

My first social justice based mathematics unit that I taught with my 6th-7th grade students was focused on immigration. I chose immigration for a variety of reasons. First of all, I knew that it was a hot topic that we would be able to find information about on the internet. Secondly, it was an area my students knew little about and I wanted to open a window for them to see into another reality. Finally, I could find books to connect what I was doing in math to literature as well.

I decided that my unit would have a major project that the students worked through in small groups. For the immigration unit I decided to have students determine the cost of the proposed wall between the United States and Mexico-along the border. They would have to determine the appropriate building materials through research and the price for the materials. They would have to include cost of human labor, cost of any rentals of equipment, cost of materials, and tax. Their final project had to include both audio and visual components and clearly explain the materials, costs, and labor needed to build their version of the wall. The final project also had to include a thorough discussion of the students beliefs about whether the wall is just or not.

The project was scaffolded for student success. They were to work in small groups (3 students/group). In each group each student had a specific role. I will discuss the roles in more detail in a future post. The goal of having specific roles was to make sure that all students were engaged in the group process. Students were to meet with their groups and myself twice a week and they had specific due dates for specific steps they had to complete on the way to their final project.

During the unit I taught frequent mini-lessons to cover the math standards they needed to complete the project. These included lessons on unit conversions, geometry, decimals and fractions, and some more basic math reviews as needed.

A little more about the context of my research

Photo: A Special Halloween Moment, Scarecrows at our school October 31, 2007

Before I begin sharing the specific social justice based math units that I used in my classroom I'd like to share a little more about my school, classroom, and students. Since one of the most important tenants of Action Research is that it is based on context, I want to make my context come alive for you, my readers.

First of all, my school is very small. We have about 30 students. Officially we have two teachers, but thanks to a grant from the National Park Service we have scraped together enough money to afford a third teacher-that's me! We are located in a National Park and, for that matter, right in the middle of arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. The views from our classroom windows and the school yard are world class.

All of my students' parents work for the park in one way or another. Most of them either work for the concessionaire or for the National Park Service. Nearly all of my students live in housing provided by the park, and no one can own a house in the "town" where the school is. This results in our socioeconomic demographic being very middle class. No one is particularly rich or poor when they live and work in the park. Most of the parents are very involved in their children's education and enjoy helping out at the school.

Our students have many opportunities because of our location. We get to go skiing for free all ski season, every other Wednesday-the whole school goes and it becomes our primary P.E. program for that part of the year. We also have special environmental education programs that are created just for the park schools so that our students can get to know their own park.

The class I was teaching during my AR project, the 6^th-8^th graders, was the oldest at the school and they go on a trip every three years to Scotland-to visit the town John Muir was born in. My students were preparing for this amazing trip as I completed my AR project with them.

We are also a distinguished school with a fairly high API and we have a lot of fun, freedom, and ability to teach in the way we believe is best within each of our wonderful classrooms. It was a pretty spectacular place to complete my AR project and continues to be a delightful place to work every day.

Social Justice Based Math Unit General Design

Photo: Me, caught in a teaching moment

Before choosing a social justice topic to focus on I began to look at how to structure the program overall. I knew, as I mentioned in my last post, that I wanted to use the text less, use computers more, and use group work more.

I decided that I would follow in the footsteps of a dedicated teacher researcher named Eric Gutstein (2006, 2007) and create project based social justice mathematics units. Each unit would have a project that was the central focus. Students would be broken up into small groups to work on the project and within the small groups students would have specific roles. The purpose of the specific roles was to manage the students group work time effectively by assigning specific jobs to each group member. I also decided that the students would work to complete their group project following a specific schedule that included steps towards completion that would each be graded individually along the way. Students would also be required to keep a project folder and a project journal. They would keep track of all their work in the journal and they would keep any loose papers in their folder. Each group would meet with me regularly to assure that they were completing the steps necessary and that their overall progress was good. The final project for the unit would be a multimedia presentation and the steps to completion would include meetings with me, research, mathematical calculations, and rough drafts and revisions of their final project. Each student's final grade would be based on their individual contributions and the final group presentation. A rubric would be used for their final grade and students would have access to the rubric during the project.

Once I'd thought through and wrote out all of these plans then I was able to begin the process of choosing a social justice focus area for our first unit. I also had to determine which mathematics standards would be covered during the unit and make a plan for lessons I would teach to cover the necessary math standards and the social justice issues' background, history, and points of view.

Choosing my Action Research Project

My final decision about my action research project topic was based both on the results from my student surveys and interviews and on what I was learning as a student myself in the MAT program. The MAT program's focus was on social justice and multiculturalism. I decided to search the existing scholarly research that combined both social justice and mathematics in education. What I found was very exciting. I found that teachers had used social justice based mathematics projects and examples to engage their students in mathematics and that some of these researchers had found that their students' academic achievement as well as their engagement in mathematics had increased. I was very excited by this connection and decided that I would design my own social justice based mathematics program and implement it with my students. I also decided that my program would include well structured group work and work on the computer and would use the text very little. In this way I would be incorporating my students' preferences, as shown in the surveys and interviews I conducted, into a new and engaging mathematics program.

My first step was to design a program that met all of the criteria mentioned above:

• Social justice issue based
  
• Group work based
  
• Computer/technology based
  

Now I knew where I was going with my research and felt like I had a viable plan for creating a program that would truly engage my students in learning mathematics. I felt that it was likely that if I were to engage students I would also increase their academic achievement in mathematics. This was a very exciting time in my research because I had a road map; I knew where I was going and how to get there. Eureka!

Photo Note: The photo is a view of the doorway to my classroom during the 2007-2008 school year.

SPSS Results and Interviewing

Using the fabulous SPSS statistical analysis program I was able to determine that there is no significant difference in how much my students like math based on gender or ethnic groups. However, since I was working with only nine students this is largely due to a small sample size. Nothing is statistically significant when you have as sample size of nine; that's just the reality of my research. However, when I looked at the means with my own eyes I could see that there was no difference in mean for liking math for boys vs. girls-the mean was exactly the same. In fact, neither the boys nor the girls liked math. The average was somewhere between Neutral and Disagree in response to the statement "I like math." However, looking closely at the means for the ethnic groups in my class (Caucasian, Hispanic, and Native American) I could see a big difference. In my class my Hispanic students liked math the best, then the Caucasian students, and the one Native American student did not like it at all. These results may not be statistically significant, but they were still significant to me, in the context of my teaching situation and my students' needs. I did not see equity-not all of my student's needs were being met in the area of mathematics.

Next I interviewed my students to gain more information. From the interviews, which I conducted individually and recorded and then transcribed, I learned that my students liked working in groups because they felt like they could learn from each other and from helping each other. I also learned that my students didn't like the text because it was not engaging. They felt like they were working in an abyss when they had to work on problems in the text by themselves. And finally, I learned that my students liked working on the computer because it was also interactive.

Both the analysis of the survey results and the information I gathered from interviewing my students led me to see that I needed a new type of mathematics program that included:

• More computer based work
  
• More group work
  
• Less text based work
  
• More equity-meeting the individual needs of each student

Note: The photo is a view of a section of my classroom in September 2007

Where the survey took me

From the open ended/written response questions on the surveys I gave to the students at my school I learned that 7/17 students who replied to the question "What is your favorite way to learn math?" preferred to learn math by working on the computer and 6/17 students preferred to learn math in small groups. These results would guide my choices throughout the rest of the Action Research. Also, three of the students in my 6^th-7^th grade class specified that if they could change one thing about math they would not use textbooks.

From the Likert scaled response questions on the survey it was clear that over 50% of the students in my 6^th-7^th grade math class did not enjoy math and most were ambivalent about the math lessons I had been teaching so far that year. Keep in mind that this survey was given in September of my first year at this school-only a few weeks of math lessons had been taught by me in my classroom at the time of the survey. The next steps in my research project were clear after looking closely at my surveys:

• I needed to run some statistics using SPSS to determine if there were any major differences in the Likert scaled response items based on groups including:
  
  • Gender
    
  • Ethnicity
    
• I needed to get more information; I needed to interview my students to probe deeper.
  

Looking deeper into my focus area: mathematics

After determining that mathematics was an area of need at my school I began formulating survey questions for the students at the school to determine what effective teaching practices were already being used and what areas might need improvement. I chose to survey the whole school because my colleagues were also interested in looking into mathematics as a school wide action research project. I also tried to create a survey that would give me a clear sense of my own students attitudes towards math and preferences for learning math.

My completed survey focused on how much students liked or did not like math in general and then strove to determine exactly what teaching techniques and/or activities students found engaging and which activities they did not find engaging. The first set of questions used a Likert Scale, the second set was multiple choice and focused on demographics, and the final set was written answer.

All three teachers at our school gave the survey (I created a smiley/grumpy faced one for the K-2nd grade class). The results of the survey indicated that the students in my class did not like math (6th-7th graders). The rest of the school was much more positive about math overall. My students, who I will focus on for my Action Research Project, particularly disliked lessons based on the text book and particularly enjoyed group work and computer supported mathematics. My next post will share some more of the specifics I learned from my survey and tell the story of where it led me next.

The Beginning

I began my action research in my 6th-7th grade classroom in Fall 2007. I had eight students for the 2007-2008 school year; four were sixth graders and four were seventh graders. It was my first year at the school and I was a first year public school teacher with a history as an environmental/outdoor educator.

My research began with informal discussions with my principal and the other two teachers at our very small school. I questioned my colleagues to determine what areas of academics were most in need of change or scrutiny. These discussions led directly to the academic area of mathematics. The students in my class had not performed well on the State Standardized tests the previous school year. Their in class test scores were also low if taken as a class average. These informal discussions and the previous year's State Standardized test results gave me my focus area: Mathematics.