Within my content area I recently had a teacher who fostered critical literacy in one of my statistics classes. This was my first stats class and I was only just beginning to understand statistics. She taught us to think through the experiment that we were reading about to determine if they were a reliable experiment or not. She taught us the important steps to creating a reliable experiment first so that we knew what to look for and so that we would be able to recognize when something wasn't quite right. Then, she asked us to go out and find an example of a reliable experiment and also to find an example of an experiment that wasn't reliable and of course to explain why on both. We were asked what we would do to “fix” the experiment. We were asked if we would “believe” this experiment.
One of the articles that I read was entitled, An Introduction to Critical Numeracy by Rex Stoessigner. The article lists four major aspects of critical numeracy. (1) Being able to critique or make critical interpretations of mathematical information. (2) Being able to unpack, interpret or decode mathematical situations. (3) Using math in a self-reflective way. Lastly, (4) Using math to operate more powerfully in the world. I think that this is powerful, for students to be able to develop their own healthy skepticism about the use of mathematics in the real world. This article gives an example: Paying the price for saving. It talks about a man who purchased every item individually to save money (based on a store policy with rounding the price of the item). After the example, the article talks about some different critical numeracy questions that a reader/observer/student could ask themselves to better understand how to feel about it in the real world (to gain a healthy skepticism about the example). This was very similar to the assignment that my stats teacher had assigned to us.
I would definitely like to teach my students how to use critical numeracy/critical literacy in their lives. It’s important for students to feel empowerment within themselves and if I can accomplish that through teaching mathematics…that will just be amazing.
Megan, what a great post! I love that stats assignment! It is such a great way to engage the students and have them actively thinking and being critical in the world of math. Great ideas to keep in store for lesson plans in the future!
ReplyDelete-Molly
I loved the four ideas about critical numeracy. I want to look more into those ideas for teaching!! While stats is harder for me I think it may have been a bit easier if I would have looked at if from the perspective you were taught!!
ReplyDeleteI love that you had a statistics teacher who actually implemented critical numeracy! I think another great way to do that is to question mathematical representations too...for instance:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11500373
You could show students representations such as this one and ask, "What is the perspective of the author? Why did s/he represent it this way instead of another way?"
Thanks again for your posting. Also, it was nice to meet you last night.