Collaborative Action Research: Shifting Focus From Pet Care to Student Collaborative Mathematical Thinking About Pets

• In Event: 21.027 - Mathematics Teachers and Researchers Supporting Student Voice in Mathematics: Collaborative Action Research or Allywork?

Abstract

This presentation highlights a transformative process that emerged during a Collaborative Action Research (CAR) project between Mathematics Teacher Educators and Mathematics Teachers. This shift informed the team’s original focus on teaching mathematics from a teacher-imagined student-centered perspective to one of student-genuine engagement in mathematical thinking. The presentation aims to promote relational self-inquiry between teaching/learning goals in mathematics and noticing of student engagement.
Taking a relational perspective (Domínguez et al., 2014) in mathematics teaching and learning, we describe the journey of our CAR project first by describing the initial set of goals for the action research project: students learning about taking care of pets and applying mathematical ideas along the process. Such goals resulted from the team’s initial assumption on what matters to students. Then, we focus on the shift of such goals through a collective transformative experience. This experience evolved into a plan for combining two groups of students (2nd and 5th grades) with the goal of having students analyze the data obtained through questionnaires on pet care administered to the entire school student population. This activity was designed so that students would collectively make choices on how to interpret and represent the data. As high-levels of student engagement evolved, the team noticed the relevance of this activity as these students’ levels of participation in mathematics had no precedence.
For the experience, teachers introduced the task of analyzing a question by modeling and collecting work with students about processes to use to code the data and how to represent it. Students themselves came up with own ideas and then moved to working in groups. Collective and careful qualitative analysis and discussion of the plan, student work, and videotaped interactions of students allowed the team to answer the following question: How does authentic project-based learning increase engagement in mathematics?
On noticing student and teacher roles the team respectively concluded (also informed by students’ input): students formed positive relationships with peers across grade levels and particularly enjoyed doing mathematics socially through hands-on activities, decision making shifted from teachers to students, students made choices which improved their sense of math learning, students justified and represented their thinking graphically About teachers: as teachers’ decision making became more flexible, the level of student engagement in mathematics allowed teachers to target many math standards at once, and students level of risk-taking increased.
Our experience helped us see the relevance of promoting an environment and a task that focused on relational experiences of students with mathematics and how students can take ownership by not only having a topic that they relate to, but to processes that promote genuine participation, collaboration, and thinking of the students.

Authors

• Carlos Alfonso LopezLeiva, University of New Mexico

• Jo-K Boegner, Flint Public Schools

• Molade Osibodu, Michigan State University

• Ashley Danielle Scroggins, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Courtney Koestler, Ohio University