As we have discussed in our class, many of us didn’t learn disciplinary literacy skills in our own education. Slowly, we have been talking about different strategies and how it is easily implemented and you don’t have to verbally say “alright class, we are going to be learning through disciplinary literacy today”. One question I am pondering is should the students know why we teach this, or should they just be taught this to enhance their comprehension skills? However, this isn’t the main point of this blog, as you may have suspected from the title. I want to talk about math. How teaching math through disciplinary literacy can change the way students feel about learning math.
I feel I am one of the few people I know that actually enjoys doing math. Math is the reason I went into education actually. I want to keep learning more and to help others learn more about math, but more than that, I want to make it enjoyable for my students. I am always hearing people say how they despise math or how awful math was to them. Perhaps it would have been different had they learned through the lense of a mathematician. Someone who is confident but also curious and knows how to explore the content. I think something that turns a lot of my peers off to the idea of mathematics is that they weren’t allowed the opportunity to explore math. They were given an algorithm, and they had to solve it the way the teacher said and if they didn’t? They would lose points on assignments.
Luckily, I was allowed to explore math. In fact, I often arrived at my answer a different way than the teachers had said, but in a way that made sense for me and made me quicker and more confident in my abilities. I believe this was disciplinary literacy. The teacher allowing me to explore. I know I keep saying explore, but it takes me back to my professor talking about his son in the skate park. He kept saying it was disciplinary literacy because he was learning on his own and having fun without dad telling him exactly how he should be doing it. This probably made it a lot more fun for him. But what about the sons who have to put their right foot in just the correct position and move their knee in the exact way? Would this be fun? I say no. I say that is exactly how it was in most math classes growing up. I say this has got to be a main reason, if not the reason students hate math and have no interest in it after they have completed their required courses.
The reading I chose to read, spoke about changing math, but I didn’t get too far in reading it before I realized it was written in 1998. This was long before I took a math class, which makes me wonder why are we still talking about transforming the math class? Has it already been done? Should it already be done? Is the point of my blog to convince someone of why we should be changing, or just to agree that this change was necessary? I’m not sure at this point in all my research and readings, but I am curious and I intend to continue reading about this in math and to also talk to my host teacher for the semester on their thoughts as well as observe the class to see if it is disciplinary literacy based. I plan on continuing this search in my blogs to come.
Citation:
Borasi, R., Siegel, M., Fonzi, J., & Smith, C. F. (1998). Using transactional reading strategies to support sense-making and discussion in mathematics classrooms: An exploratory study. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29(3), 275. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/223501394?accountid=10610
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