5c. Diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness
ISTE-CS 5c
"Model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally with students, peers, parents, and the larger community"
Evidence of competence in ISTE-CS
In my Global Collaborative Project, “Tell me about a time you used math,” I used Google Forms and social networking sites to collect stories where people described times when math was useful in real life. (You can still submit stories here.) As I’ve said before, these stories could be used to address the common student lament that math isn’t useful in real life, but what I haven’t said is that this project is about giving voice to experiences and learning from others’ experiences. My goal with this project, which is ongoing, is to generate narratives about math content. Doing this is important because narratives help us make meaning. Narratives give us new possibilities for stories about ourselves, and thus, possibilities for new identities (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Narratives give us insight that can help us to be more empathetic. Narratives help us find value in the things we don’t understand. These ideas are rooted in social learning perspectives, where learning and making meaning is not just about obtaining information, but about positioning that information in a social world in ways that make it meaningful. At face value, this project is about making math meaningful through narratives. But underneath that, this project is about learning to value other people’s stories. Students need opportunities to find value in narratives, because learning how to do that is part of developing cultural understanding and appreciation for diversity.
References
Sfard, A., & Prusak, A. (2005). Telling identities: In search of an analytic tool for investigating learning as a culturally shaped activity. Educational researcher, 34(4), 14-22.