The Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS) will host a Twitter chat tomorrow, Wednesday February 29, 2 PM to 3 PM EST to explore how schools and community organizations can help kids learn anytime, anywhere using digital media, mobile devices and online games. During this conversation, you will have the opportunity to share your experiences, learn best practices, and discuss how you can overcome challenges in using technology effectively in out-of-school time.
The chat will feature representatives from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS, Coalition Director Carol Tang (@SciAfterSchool), the Afterschool Alliance (@afterschool4all), and other special guests from community organizations and schools who are actively using technology to expand learning for kids.
To join the chat and see what others are saying:
Go to tweetchat.com and search on the hashtag #techafter3.
You do not need a Twitter account to follow the chat, but you do need one to comment or ask questions. If you need to set up a twitter account, you can sign up at http://www.twitter.com. It’s free to join and only takes a minute.
To join the discussion, sign into TweetChat using your Twitter account and enter your tweets in the box at the top of the page. TweetChat automatically includes the hashtag for you.
Each tweet is limited to 140 characters (including the hashtag #techafter3) but feel free to multiple tweets to pose a question or respond to a comment.
CBASS’s Twitter handle is @CBASS_National. Feel free to submit questions in advance, either by sending CBASS a message on Twitter or emailing them to emorgan@tascorp.org.
Last week the Coalition for After School joined school districts, community based organizations, service providers and policy makers who care about quality after school programming at Beyond School Hours in Burlingame, CA. We were excited to be in the great company of educators and administrators from around the country to share ideas, best practices and strategies for improving outcomes for youth outside of school time, throughout the year.
Many of the educators we spoke to at our booth expressed their desire to do more science with the youth in their programs, but were somewhat unsure about where to begin. Luckily our presentation at BSH was crafted with providers like these in mind. For organizations just starting to think about offering STEM after school we presented a panel entitled STEM After School: Getting the Most from Science Museums, Aquariums and Zoos.
The central idea that Coalition Director Carol Tang presented is that after school providers don't need to dedicate an exorbitant amount of time or money becoming experts in science before offering rich learning experiences in STEM. Science centers including museums, aquariums, zoos and national parks draw upon deep knowledge from the STEM fields and offer a wealth of workshops and classes that are a perfect match for out of school time programs. These organizations are looking for ways to reach large audiences, and that is exactly what after school programs have to offer, so partnerships between the two can really be a perfect fit!
There is a spectrum of depth in partnerships between after school organizations and science centers. On one end is something like a one-time visit, where your program takes a field trip or pays for an outreach group to visit your site. On the other end is a long term investment over the course of months or years. This can be inquiry into an issue of interest to the kids and the science center staff.
Check out these forms of partnerships after school organizations can have with science centers. Which would work best for your organization?
A) External STEM program provider
Partner provides STEM activities directly to students at their institution, at after school site or outdoors.
B) STEM partner provides staff development
Partner may train staff or train program leaders who then lead and support theirafter school staff (train-the-trainer model).
C) Materials-based partnership
Partner provides equipment, curriculum and hands-on activities and could provide training to support these.
D) Partnerships with STEM providers
(1) Customizing the partner’s standard curriculum or
(2) establishing new partnerships to serve youth audiences.
E) STEM educators as coaches
Partner provides content and pedagogical expertise to support afterschool staff and programming.
Recently I blogged about the Math and Social Justice Conference that I went to in San Francisco. It was a great opportunity to learn about issues of equity in teaching and learning math, and to meet leaders in the after school arena who are focused on these issues. Two of these leaders agreed to do a Q&A with me for the blog this week: Chad Milner, the National Director of Programs of the Young People's Project (YPP), and Sepehr Vakil, Program Director of Oakland Science and Math Outreach (OSMO). Read on to learn more about their organizations and overlapping interests.
Coalition for Science After School: Tell me a little about the mission of your organization in your own words.
Chad Milner of The Young People’s Project: The Young People's Project was founded in Jackson Mississippi in 1996 as an outgrowth of the Algebra Project. I say an outgrowth in the sense of the sprit and vision of the work, as well as the actual individuals who took this work on. The Algebra Project was started in 1982 by Robert Moses, a former Mississippi field secretary for SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and later on MacArthur Genius grant awardee. Its vision centered around, leveraging Dr. Moses' ground up approach to voter registration in the civil rights era, and apply that to math education now. He chose math literacy as a key to 21st century citizenship for poor and marginalized communities of color within the US. Fast forward about 10 years, during the early 1990's the first students who came up through the program, including Moses' own children, had finished college and a few had decided to join him in Mississippi to work with AP in the schools down there. While there, the recent college grads started to work not just in the school, but outside of school and created a youth led "math lab". It was through this and other relationships that YPP was born, as an out of school based response to the issue of promoting and enabling math literate communities of youth.
Sepehr Vakil of Oakland Science and Math Outreach (OSMO): In 2009, while working as an engineer in Berkeley I organized the OSMO project with the help of teachers from Oakland Technical High School and the La Pena cultural center in Berkeley. My vision was to improve access to outside-the-classroom learning opportunities in mathematics, science and digital media to Oakland public high school students. Since 2009, OSMO moved to the Boys and Girls Club of Oakland, and I enrolled in the Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology PhD program at UC Berkeley. The mission of OSMO is to build a powerful link between a community organization and the university in an effort to support deep math and science content knowledge for Oakland students. A secondary goal of OSMO is to advance research on equity in STEM fields.
These are some of the research questions being explored in the OSMO project:
How can research in learning and cognition inform the design of an outside-the-classroom educational program in an urban context?
What kind of an out-of-school support structure is necessary to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged and historically underrepresented youth in STEM fields?
If the goal of public education is to promote social change, what role does math and science education play?
How can recent advances in digital media and open-source technologies be leveraged in after school contexts? How can science and math education take advantage of these technologies?
What does math, science and digital literacy mean? How do we achieve it?
CSAS: What was your interest in the Math and Social Justice conference? Why were you there? Why is equity in math education an important issue to you?
Vakil: There are people in the education world interested in STEM. There are other folks interested in equity and social justice. It is a rare opportunity to meet researchers, teachers and community organizers that are thinking and working at the intersection between social justice and mathematics. I attended the conference to meet other people who are committed to connecting the dots between these two seemingly disparate fields.
In his book Radical Equations, Robert Moses asserts that math literacy is as important to democratic citizenship today as reading and writing was for African-Americans in the 1960s civil rights movement. Not only do I agree that literacy in math (and science and digital media literacy) is critical for active participation in our democracy, I would also say the critical thinking that is unique to mathematics is in itself an opportunity for student empowerment. In other words, the intellectual heavy lifting that is required in STEM fields, particularly in math, is necessary for tomorrow’s leaders who need to rethink and reimagine a society that is more just and more progressive than the one we find ourselves in today.
Milner: This was my 3rd Math and Social Justice conference. The first two I attended were in Brooklyn. I first got introduced to the conference by Jonathan Osler, a former Algebra Project student from Cambridge, MA, who initiated the vision for this conference while teaching math at a high school in New York. Since then I have really enjoyed the intersection of education, social change, and community activism that have come to define the space of Creating Balance. It was great hearing Lisa Delpit speak, an amazing educator whose work I have admired and has also been an ally to our work here at YPP.
CSAS: OSMO is based at the Boys & Girls Club in Oakland. What kinds of youth do you serve? What are the particular challenges these kids face in learning math and science?
Vakil: Currently we have 12 high school students from Oakland Technical High School and Skyline High School. We also have a student from Mcclymonds in West Oakland, another from Oakland School For the Arts, and an 8th grader from Bret Hart Middle School. Our students range in academic preparedness and motivation. Some of our students are already focused and participate in OSMO to really push their thinking and develop deep content mastery, while other students are really struggling to stay focused and motivated. So the challenges really vary student to student. And the great thing about an informal, after school environment is that we have the flexibility to customize the program based on each student’s needs.
CSAS: Chad, I had the pleasure of participating in YPP's workshop at the conference. That was the most active math lesson I've ever had! Can you describe a few more successful activities YPP has come up with to get kids excited about learning math?
Milner: “Flagway” is a sorting game, based on the Mobius function that kids can play from 3rd grade and up. YPP has modified this game to be a running and physical game that can be played in community spaces such as a gym or playground.
“Road Coloring” was developed in partnership with Greg Budzban at Southern Illinois University. This mathematically based game involves building a city with roads and buildings.
“Algebra Labs” are targeted for 6-8th graders, and take students through a series of hands on activities that teach and reinforce understanding of core algebraic concepts. The ultimate goal of the labs are to help enable students to complete Algebra 1 by the end of 8th grade.
There are a few others as well. All YPP games and activities are built on our core pedagogical approach, modeled after Kolb's learning cycle. It takes students through a shared experience and through reflection and deconstruction of this experience, the mathematics is drawn out. We also call it the 5-step process.
CSAS: At the conference I was excited to hear you two talk about a potential partnership [between YPP and OSMO]. Why would you partner with each other? What would the partnership ideally look like for both of you?
Milner: YPP is working to broaden the reach of our model and work. We have developed a program model called "YPP@" which is meant to serve as a sort of YPP lite. This allows us to further our mission and vision as an organization and also enables communities and institutions across the country to embrace and customize the YPP model within their existing infrastructure.
Vakil: An ultimate goal of OSMO, beyond promoting deep science and math knowledge, is to cultivate and make available productive STEM identities for our students. This goes beyond “Oh, I think math and science are cool and I’m good at it!” What I’m really talking about here is what YPP really excels at: giving high school students the confidence and leadership to not only be good at math but also take on the task of promoting math literacy in their own communities. Now that’s what student empowerment is all about. Though there are no immediate plans for us to work together, the potential is definitely there. In the meantime, we are taking notes!
We are thrilled that Washington DC is buzzing about STEM education lately!
Last November, Congressman Michael Honda of Silicon Valley proposed the STEM Education Innovation Act, which would create an Office of STEM Education in the Department of Education. Read Congressman Honda’s appeal to Congress to pass the STEM Act here.
Last week, President Obama highlighted the importance of STEM education in his State of the Union address. Here is some of our favorite media coverage of the address, where the President linked STEM education to American innovation, jobs and the economy.
Then the Today show did a heartwarming story about a recently homeless teenager who was invited to attend the State of the Union address. What has helped her stay positive during this difficult time for her family? Doing science! Watch her story here.
When I told friends and colleagues last week that I was excited to go to a conference on Math and Social Justice, I saw a lot of curious and confused faces. Many of them said that it sounded interesting, but what does math have to do with social justice?
Well, did you hear the one about the math teacher in Georgia who assigned slavery-themed word problems to a class of third graders?
The Creating Balance in an Unjust World 2012 conference brought together over 300 educators, youth and community members at Mission High School in San Francisco. The conference featured 31 workshops and 50 workshop facilitators who engaged attendees in discussions of equity, justice, pedagogy and practices. The keynote speaker was Dr. Lisa D. Delpit, the author of Other People's Children and Multiplication is for white people.
I quickly understood that this was a very hands-on conference, with most of the attendees being math or science instructors eager to learn about the intersection of math and social justice, forge partnerships, share best practices, discuss challenges and plan for advocacy. The major themes of the conference were:
Social Justice in the Mathematics Classroom
Understanding the math around us is important for all youth, and perhaps especially for at-risk and marginalized populations. At the conference, Jessica Hopson from Portland Youth Builders presented a powerful lesson she developed about the impact of gun violence on children and teens. By using current events or historical information as a jumping off point in the math classroom, teachers shared new and culturally relevant ways to motivate students to understand graphs, charts, statistical trends, causal relationships, percentages and other math.
Additionally, educators interested in incorporating a social justice component in their classroom or after school programs presented how to convey concepts and information through math. Teacher educators who believe that mathematics courses for preservice teachers should have a social justice and equity focus met at the conference to design courses with social justice-oriented lessons.
Mathematics literacy as a "gatekeeper"
We already have a good sense that the mastery of math, and the corresponding test scores, act as a gatekeeper for higher education and better jobs. But a good understanding of math is also the key to some basic "gatekeeping" life skills. Teachers from El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, NY presented a 9th grade math unit called "Finance My Life" which gives students a basic understanding of budgeting, loans, taxes and savings.
Gatekeeping also comes into play in the sense that a student gets 'locked out' of higher math, and therefore related science, engineering and technology fields, without a solid base of knowledge. A presentation by the Boston Public Schools' Secondary Math Department and MathPOWER, a Boston-based non-profit, described an innovative partnership to attempt to keep the 'gates' open under new district demands on the 8th grade algebra requirements. In this partnership, teachers and students elected to spend 3 or 5 weeks in the summer to focus on pre-algebra skills and prepare for the school year.
Ethnomathematics
It may seem as though math is an international language, but math instruction can be alienating without equitable teaching practices. The term "ethnomathematics" was used first used by a Brazilian mathematician named Ubiratan D'Ambrosio to describe the mathematical practices of different cultural groups. He said,
Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world. The only possibility of building up a planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers and, together, winners and losers, moving into the new. [Ethnomathematics, then, is] a step towards peace.
By far the most heady and philosophical theme of the conference, being introduced to the idea of Ethnomathematics was the highlight of the conference for me. To explore further, I recommend watching this video, which I watched as part of a discussion by Professor Anita Bright of Portland State University.
The Dot and the Line won an Academy Award in 1965. As you watch, think about how this short cartoon uses mathematical terms to express social and cultural values.
Overall, it was an incredibly inspiring and eye-opening conference. In light of horrifying international social injustice in the STEM field, it is up to us to move discussions about math and social justice from theory into practice. Check out the complete list of 2012 conference presenters to find out who the leaders in this area are, and get your literature review and background from Joan Kwako's article in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education.
Please comment what your organization is doing to address issues of social justice with math and science, or how you ensure the youth you work with are receiving an equitable STEM education!
