My Universe: Preservice Teachers' Understanding of Quantity and Scale Through Poetry

• In Event: Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Pushing the Envelope: Examining Holistic Education Practices in Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper, we show how elementary pre-service teachers’ sense of quantity and scale can be developed through the use of poems. We analyze ten poems of eight pre-service teachers’ at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. The poems were modeled after Nanao Sakaki’s poem A Love Letter. The study suggests that using poems to connect personal experiences with the sense of quantity and scale enabled students to create their own authentic descriptions of their lives. Although, the challenges remain for students to authentically create with larger quantities, we believe that the use of poems is a promising tool for the development of students’ sense of numbers.

Authors

• Nenad Radakovic, College of Charleston

• Susan Jagger, Ryerson University

• Limin Jao, McGill University