Developing culturally grounded social-ecological mathematical tasks for secondary school mathematics
4 - 18 November 2024
Biography
Dr Sigal-Hava Rotem is a newly appointed Assistant Professor at the Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Prior to this position, she was a lecturer at Achva Academic College (Israel), a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University (Israel), a fellow in the Mandel Program for Academic Leadership in Teacher Education, and a post-doctoral fellow at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece). She completed her PhD in Mathematics Education at the University of Haifa (Israel), focusing on the characterising changes in professional noticing skills among pre-service mathematics teachers during a field-based teaching preparation program. During her PhD, she was awarded as an Azrieli fellow by the Azrieli Fellows Program. Dr Rotem has an M.Sc. in Science Education from the Weizmann Institute of Science and an M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering from Tel Aviv University. Her B.Sc. is in Industrial Engineering and Management from Ben Gurion University.
Building on her expertise in investigating how pre-service mathematics teachers learn to notice students’ mathematical thinking, Dr Rotem’s current research focuses on different ways in which mathematics teachers can advance students’ mathematical thinking while introducing out-of-school contexts. In particular, how social, environmental and technological contexts can be introduced in the mathematics classroom to support students’ mathematics thinking in cognitive, social, emotional and embodied ways. To investigate students’ mathematics thinking, she uses the construct of critical events, which she developed during her PhD studies. Critical events are moments in which students’ thinking is apparent, and the teacher can delve further into the mathematics presented in the lesson. Hence, when introducing the different out-of-school contexts, Dr Rotem works with the teachers on identifying and interpreting these events to learn and build on their students’ mathematical thinking
Research Summary
Recent trends in mathematics education call for teaching mathematics while engaging students in tasks that introduce students to the use of mathematics in different contexts. The shift in the curriculum also sets the opportunity to design new tasks that attend to the socio-ecological environment in which students live, meaning considering the social environment, the natural environment, and their intersection, as an inherent part of mathematics education and linking education to community action. Nevertheless, current tasks used in Israel (and elsewhere) represent middle-class everyday contexts rather than socio-ecological issues. Socioecological issues are culturally dependent, and different communities face different socioecological challenges. In particular, those challenges faced by marginalised communities cannot be found in common textbooks and school materials, across the world.
Thus, this project aims to map the socio-ecological issues that local marginalised communities in Israel are concerned with, focusing on two communities, one from the Jewish sector and the other from the Bedouin. The students from both communities usually come from the socio-economical periphery and are first-generation in higher education
This study has significant potential in terms of social and ecological justice, as it highlights the socio-ecological issues of marginalised communities in Israel, which will then be transformed into mathematical tasks taught in secondary schools, particularly among the Bedouin community, who, along with other marginalised communities, do not receive much attention from the mathematics education research community. Further, although the communities at hand are minority groups in Israeli society, this study will allow learning how socio-ecological issues of marginalised communities can be unravelled and transformed into mathematical tasks that are appropriate for mathematics classrooms, bringing genuine communal socio-ecological issues into the mathematics classroom, instead of bringing the textbook writers’ perspectives. Furthermore, other researchers in other places can use the methods used in this study to bring their own communal socio-ecological issues into the mathematics classroom.
Dr. Rotem and Prof. Coles's work will target leading journals in mathematics education and research funds both in the UK (ESRC Standard Grant) and Israel to expand the methodology of this project and work with other marginalised communities, using the project as a proof of concept. Today, global warming and climate crisis are becoming more prevalent as we see recent wildfires and floods worldwide. This creates a pressing need to attend to the communal socio-ecological issues each community faces. Thus, as this study suggests an approach to bringing current climate crises forward as a part of the mathematics curriculum, we anticipate media interest in our work from both countries
You can contact Dr Rotem's host Alf Coles for more information.
