The Vancouver School Board hosted a summer institute for teachers at the end of August and the morning session was focused on place-based and inquiry-based approaches to the teaching and learning of mathematics. Although most of the attendees were from Vancouver, there were teachers from all over the Lower Mainland in attendance.
Gina Wong who hosted the event, put together a lovely takeaway package for each attendee, including a provocation postcard with questions to inspired place-based inquiry.
We spent part of our morning at Memorial Park in Vancouver, where I had set up pedagogical provocations around a pond. Teachers engaged with the questions, inspiring their thinking about how they might create holistic learning experiences for their students in their contexts. For many teachers, this is a shift in pedagogy and we need to trust ourselves and our students as we make this shift. Teachers need to consider what they need to make this shift - flexibility in timetables, deeper knowledge of the mathematics in order to be responsive to students, different tools to assess student learning, etc. We considered many of the tenets of BC's redesigned curriculum - incorporating the First Peoples Principles of Learning, considering personalized and inquiry-based ways of learning, seeking connections and inter-relatedness between "subjects" - and taking students outdoors and making connections to the land and to place through mathematics is one way of pulling all these things together.
I had pulled a collection of books off my shelf that focus on outdoors learning and promised I would put together a book list.... Download Outdoor Learning Resources book list.
This summer institute was part of an ongoing conversation we are having as a group within our province. Our BCAMT Reggio-Inspired Mathematics project will continue to examine principles and practices to enhance the teaching and learning of mathematics and place-based learning is one of the areas we are investigating. To be continued...
~Janice