RMEv4n1, 3-5-05
FEATURE
A Place for Place-based Assessment Erik Gunn
As a Native American and a resident of Wisconsin’s Oneida Reservation, Elaine Salinas knows the distinct educational needs of her community intimately. And as steward for the Upper Midwest Region of the Rural School and Community Trust (RSCT), she has the opportunity to do something about it.
Salinas teaches workshops on implementing place-based assessment programs. Her work for the RSCT takes her to Native American reservations and rural farming
communities across Wisconsin and in neighboring states. Salinas has come to champion place-based education as an approach especially well suited to instruction in rural communities, and she periodically presents workshops in Place-Based Assessment, such as a two-day seminar held in Hayward, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2004.
Place-based education is particularly important in rural communities, because
focusing on place “provides a context for learning and makes learning relevant for kids as well as adults,” Salinas explains. Public education isn’t just about helping individuals achieve, she asserts; it also is intended to connect young people to the community, teaching them how to contribute to society as a whole.
skills. It’s particularly important in rural places, because what has happened a lot in rural education is we've focused on educating people to leave their communities. We’ve focused on the global economy, and the lifeblood that rural communities need to sustain themselves is leaving. The message has been, ‘Graduate from high school and get your college degree, and then go somewhere else to pursue your dreams.’ Place-based education gives a real opportunity for young people to learn how to be part of a community and to form attachment to a community.”
To measure how well schools actually accomplish that, Salinas’s workshop teaches portfolio assessment. Portfolio assessment grew out of a desire on the part of rural schools from all over the US, ranging from the Appalachians to Alaska to the Southwest, to see not just what students were learning individually, but how their learning was contributing to the larger community.
“We’ve got standardized tests, but we don’t have a way to tell the full story—to show all the things kids are learning that isn’t tested,” Salinas says. “Citizenship is just one of those areas—how do you test citizenship? It was our desire to create a process that schools could use that would be very credible and very valid to tell their story about the work that was taking place.”
“Any piece of work could be looked at through any of those lenses,” Salinas says. And it’s not just the teachers, school or even students who assess the results—the entire community can play a role.
The work of Bob Moses, who has promoted teaching algebra to impoverished inner-city and rural African Americans, illustrates the importance of place-based consciousness in teaching. With the exception of Asian children, children who belong to ethnic and cultural minorities are particularly at risk for falling behind in math and science, Salinas notes. Moses, however, equates algebra with voting rights—as a filter that blocks or opens the door to long-term social success.
Looking at school systems with large numbers of African Americans, especially but not only in the South, Moses has found “you have African American kids being tracked out of algebra based on race,” Salinas says. Moses and colleagues have worked on an algebra curriculum “that doesn’t allow that to happen—they would use place and culture and a community as a context for teaching these concepts.”
Similar approaches have been taken among Alaska natives and the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Educators in those communities “use context first,” says Salinas. In Alaska, they’ve worked from understanding the economy and the life of local residents, “and from there teachers pull out the standards and the concepts that will be taught.” In New Mexico, the Santa Fe Indian School went to the elders of the community and asked what they felt it was important for young people to know. One issue that arose was the
importance of environmental knowledge—a priority informed by the presence of the nearby Los Alamos nuclear laboratories, which had sparked concerns about
“The teachers became translators,” Salinas says. “They translated what the elders said into the curriculum for kids—a lot of them with a heavy math and science focus.” Place-based teaching is more likely than not to be interdisciplinary, with math
instruction layered in along with lessons in language arts, history, science, and civics, and a portfolio-based assessment program in mathematics would reflect that.
“You begin with the kind of work that you wanted to do,” Salinas says. “Math needs to be woven into any kind of project.” As students undertake such a community project, what they are learning in each discipline is measured against the disciplinary standards already established.
The assessment itself requires the creation by the assessment team of a narrative that examines what students learned against the original goals set for the project, and shows how students demonstrated mastery of a concept.
“Once that portfolio is done, you would take that out and present it to a broader group in the community,” Salinas says. The Harvard team that helped devise the approach found that “this kind of learning was really powerful for young people,” she adds, “and one reason it was so powerful was that there was an audience beyond the school. They were out beyond the walls of the school; they were there where the community could see what they were doing. It began to change the community's view about young people. The broader community is not only observing, but they’re being asked to assess the progress of this work.”
community elders might expect that young people “should” be taught the way they were, with an emphasis on rote memorization of facts and formulae.
Salinas says that while such conflicts sometimes arise in the debate over education standards, by focusing portfolio assessment on broader thinking and learning skills rather than focusing on isolated facts, educators can largely transcend them. “Our focus is on teaching young people to think critically,” Salinas says. “That's what being a good citizen is all about. It's not about having discrete bits of knowledge. It's about learning to think critically and assess things for yourself.”
Mainstream education, she continues, often focuses on teaching “the symbolism” of a discipline, while the approach she recommends emphasizes context and real-world application. “That’s where meaning happens.” She recalls a Wisconsin teacher who felt his middle school math students were ready for advanced concepts. “He stepped away from the textbooks and he had them construct model roller-coasters,” says Salinas. Using graphing calculators, the students learned about the advanced trigonometry that underlies roller-coaster design.
While some education critics who favor standardized testing have dismissed
portfolio-assessment as “too subjective,” Salinas emphasizes that portfolio assessment is not being offered as a substitute, but rather as an additional source of information. “We don’t say to people, ‘Do the portfolio instead of standardized testing,’” Salinas says. “We realize that schools have to do standardized testing. The other way we guard against subjectivity is, when we develop the portfolio and when we go out and do training [in portfolio-based assessment], we spend a lot of time on what constitutes good
The process also emphasizes having “this broad base of people involved in the assessment process,” she continues. “It’s never just the student assessing his own learning, it’s never just the teacher assessing the student’s learning. Plus, it’s measured against a rubric.” The result, says Salinas, “actually is a much broader picture of student learning than what you get in a standardized test.”
A stand-out example of the potential of place-based education is found in Howard, South Dakota, Salinas says. Growing up in a community that insiders and outsiders alike were convinced as dying, high school students in Howard in the late 1990s undertook a project to survey community residents, analyze the community’s cash flow and spark economic development efforts by encouraging a 10-percent increase in local spending. (The project is documented by What Kids Can Do, a non-profit that seeks to make public “the voices and views of adolescents” http://www.whatkidscando.org. It is described at <http://www.whatkidscando.org/youthcivicengagement/smalltowns.html.)
FEATURE Studying the Folk
Sue Nichols
“When I was in fifth grade, the meanest man I ever met was my math teacher. Absolutely the meanest person I ever met. And of course what it did was make me think that every math person was mean, rotten, not creative, no fun in life.” Surprisingly enough, this sentiment was voiced by Dr. Dave Lucas of Ohio University – Southern Campus. As a result of this, Dr. Lucas went through life hating math. It was only recently that he allowed himself to consider that perhaps it wasn’t math he hated. More than likely, it was that those negative feelings about that particular teacher had influenced his view of mathematics. This revelation was prompted by a folknography project Dr. Lucas recently led to discuss mathematics in a small Appalachian town. During one of the interviews, a resident discussed her mathematics background. An older woman, she attributed her reasons for not taking advanced mathematics courses in high school to her fear of the teacher. “He was violent. Can’t figger why math makes people so hateful, can you?” Dr. Lucas could totally relate.
March of 2004. The biggest surprise for Team Folknography was, contrary to their fears during the planning stage, that these people would actually talk about mathematics. The biggest surprise for this interviewer was the enthusiastic reports that were evidence of life-changing experiences on the part of researchers involved with the Padua Project. What is folknography and from where did it come? “The old adage that necessity breeds invention is right,” Dr. Lucas answers. Lucas, along with a group of
undergraduate students from Ohio University-Southern Campus, have been using the research method known as folknography to gather information about what Lucas calls “the folk.” To be more precise, folknography allows one to study the culture of a group of people through the eyes of that same people. Folknography gives voice to the people. Who better to answer questions about a culture than the people who make up that
According to Lucas, folknography is different. “I think first and foremost is that this is a voice-giving method. In other words, ethnographers tend to go in and sit back and sometimes they’re even called ‘hut sitters.’ And they sort of tell everybody how it is. But really, I don’t want to know what you [the researcher] think… I want to know what the Gullah Geechee think. I want them to tell me how it is.” Ethnographers, he said, were reporting that the Gullah Geechee culture was disappearing. Yet when asked if their culture was disappearing the Gullah Geechee disagreed. One lady was reported to have said, “Our culture is not disappearing. I’m still here.” Lucas considers this voice-giving the most important feature of folknography. In addition, folknographers do not try to be inconspicuous and hide out like ethnographers: “We do recognize that the presence of the researcher is going to affect the social fabric. They know we’re there and we don’t even pretend to try to hide. We stick out like sore thumbs.”
debriefing and writing session, the work was submitted to a live website tracking the activities of the team. This real-time reporting opens the door to another unique feature of folknography: the participatory nature it invites. While in Padua, there were people from as far away as Australia and England as well as the families of the researchers and the residents of Padua who were following the daily activities of the research group. As narratives and pictures were posted to the website, interested observers were
communicating with the team as to their activities past and future. This event was dubbed “feed forward” as opposed to feedback. This added to the effectiveness of the project, according to Lucas. The people or residents thought about things that would add to the research and shared that with the group in real time.
It was during the debriefing sessions, because of the reflective nature of the activity, that students really began to get a sense for life in Padua. Each of the researchers
reported being affected by some aspect of this rural community and its circumstance. “It’s life-changing for them,” reports Lucas.
Melissa felt a deep concern for the young people of the community and its lack of resources and future job potential: “There is nothing for these young people to do as a social activity, but there is also nothing for them to do to boost the economy or to make a living.” George was appreciative of what he has. “It brought me to reality,” he said, considering the opportunities he has compared to the residents of Padua.
Folknography gives all students an opportunity to look at the subject of study from different perspectives.
While it is true that these students from Ironton, Ohio, saw their trip to Padua as an adventure, it certainly was not entered into as a spring break vacation. “It’s not academic tourism. These students are paying their own way,” declared Dr. Lucas. Prior to the trip to Padua, students spent a quarter preparing for this project. They spent hours
brainstorming questions and what they felt would happen. The final list of interview questions was approved by Ohio University’s Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects. Students were instructed in proper techniques for
interviewing, and they had practiced their developing skills on friends and family before embarking on the trip. Safety of the team being a priority, Lucas also discussed protocols for the teams to follow once they arrived. For instance, students were always to work in pairs. A strict adherence to a predetermined plan for confrontational situations was discussed in class: “When you run into a problem,” Lucas advised his students, “back out gracefully, be polite and kind, don’t take on a fight, come and see me immediately wherever I am.”
On this particular project, the folknographers were going to a small, mountainous town to ask people what they thought about mathematics and the importance of
mathematics courses. Of the seven researchers participating in this interview, all but one reported disliking mathematics. George “hated” math in high school but, much like the people of Padua, he found that when he got out of school and got into construction, he learned very quickly that “math plays a very important role in your life….Personally, I hate it but I know what it’s worth, so I’ll deal with it and take it.” And Dr. Lucas himself gained new insight into how his fear of his fifth-grade math teacher had shaded his perceptions of math his whole life.
more efficient—that much better to work under those kind of conditions and not drag the rest of the team down.”
Erica Melvin agreed with Melissa. She interviews people in the course of her
everyday work as a health care survey interviewer and believes that folknography helped prepare her for that job. “A lot of the questions I ask them and a lot of the way I do it is because I went through this and the different folknography things I’ve done.”
For Jae Jung, the biggest impact on her life has been the necessity to write. Although she speaks English, she had never written in English and had never taken on any type of reflective, descriptive, or analytical writing. Writing daily narratives is a requirement for the whole team. Not only for Jae but for the other students as well, the hardest part of the writing was to write up every interview and every narrative in first person and in present tense. While awkward for most writers, using “I” and “does” invites readers to engage the reported experiences more personally.
The life-altering characteristic of the folknography experience is not a description given only by current students. A former student, says Lucas, who participated in the first folknograhic adventure in Mexico in 1999, reports that her experience with folknography has helped her to define a worldview and to become an exact, organized person. Folknography is scientific in the sense that it demands researchers follow a specific procedure, systematically. Folknography helped this student become the type of person who knows the next question to ask, where she needs to go, and what she needs to do in the course of her everyday life.
answers seemed almost lyrical to someone who has only shared in this event through the written word of the project’s report, and these conversations across a table almost a year later.
Nicky, who was the quietest student during our interview, reported a new-found confidence. Padua was filled with “firsts” for her: her first trip away from home, her first time staying in a hotel. She returned home with a confidence in herself that she claims not to have had before the experience.
Melissa, a self-reported talker, learned, she says, to listen. Because of the nature of folknography, she was forced to stop talking and to listen to what others were saying. “It’s not about us. It’s not about what I think. It’s about what they think, and you have to listen, listen, listen, listen, listen…..” she said, emphasizing each “listen” with a clap of her hands.
George agreed with Melissa and says he walked away with better listening skills, and also found an increased appreciation for his own circumstances in life. “I wish I was able… to take what everybody wants to say and give it to somebody who needs to hear it,” he said.
Dr. Lucas, not immune to new learning experience, talked about a deep sense of appreciation for the Appalachian culture and the integrity of these mountain people:
you make friends talking about math? That’s just not something you go out and make friends about. They’re quality human beings. I’ve been on college campuses, university campuses where nobody cared if I was there. I’ve given conference papers where people didn’t care if I was there. So we go to this obscure, out-of-the way, mountain town, and these people embrace you while you’re asking them questions about math and math education. I walked off saying, “This is what life is all about.”
The trip to Padua to enquire what people think about mathematics gave these non-traditional, undergraduate students the chance to do something that reportedly changed their lives. As researchers they were welcomed into a small Appalachian town to “give voice” to the people, and when they left, it was with a degree of sadness because in a short period of time they had come to care about the people of Padua. After having been immersed in the community, included in social events, treated to family photos, and involved in conversations telling life stories, this group said their goodbyes amidst hugs and tears. This is not the typical ending scenario of a research project. Dr. Lucas, the designer of folknography, smiled and said, “Hey, what can I say? That’s why I love studying the folk.”
FEATURE
Mathematics Success & Failure: A Book Review Rick Anderson, Portland State University
Martin, D. B. (2000). Mathematics success and failure among African-American youth: The roles of sociohistorical context, community forces, school influence, and individual agency. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
graph-theoretical terms, each component of the framework can be thought of as a vertex in a complete graph on four vertices.)
One component Martin considers is the sociohistorical character of mathematics achievement among African Americans. Historically, education – and mathematics education specifically – has not been available to African Americans in the same way as it has been to other groups in American society. This is compounded by the social and economic place African Americans have occupied within the social structure of the United States. Martin claims these factors do not determine today’s African American students’ mathematics achievement, but they do contribute to the context of mathematics learning today.
Turning to a more contemporary view of African American life, Martin highlights three other components: community, school, and individual. Community beliefs include those about mathematics abilities, the importance of mathematics knowledge, math-dependent socioeconomic and educational goals, and expectations for students (p. 172). As for the school component, Martin considered teachers’ beliefs about students, parents, and communities; teachers’ curricular goals; and student culture and achievement norms. In the fourth component, he describes themes of students’ personal identities, goals, and beliefs about the relationship between mathematics and themselves.
The usefulness of this framework for understanding the complexity of African American students’ mathematics success and failure becomes evident in the empirical reports. It also becomes evident that additional theoretical work needs to be done to clarify concepts such as mathematics socialization and identity. While providing a basis for understanding the events, these ideas are left largely undefined.
Martin’s framework raises questions about mathematics education in the rural
context. How do the social and historical elements of a rural community interact with the beliefs and purposes of mathematics education? How do rural students’ goals and
expectations relate to their mathematics achievement? What leads to mathematics success or failure among rural students? The framework and accompanying empirical example hold promise for research into understanding mathematics education in context, including the rural context.
FEATURE
Doing Rural Differently: A Travelogue and Related Film Recommendation Craig Howley, Ohio University
Rural France: Doing Rural Differently
A trip to France this December showed me that rural can be done differently in different capital-S “States” (nations). In recent years, we’d traveled twice to France, staying both times in Paris. We saw the museums, went to concerts, walked the
neighborhoods, did our quota of shopping (got some nifty latches to use on barn-stalls at a big department store near the Paris city hall).
By the end of the second trip, we were questioning our cultural sanity. All these throngs, even in December, gawking at, you know, the Mona Lisa, the Cézannes,
traipsing through the modern and post-modern art at the Pompidou Center—ugh! We’re rural people, or at least, we’ve lived rural for a long time, and we see and prize the wonders, the miracles, of life in the country. It’s a difficult life of wonders and miracles; it’s not a convenient set of miracles and wonders; and it’s by no means fashionable or widely admired and envied. What exactly were we doing, confining ourselves to the City of Lights, wondrous as it is in its own too-highly-regarded way?
The uncle was troubled: “The suburban line is dangerous; there have been
muggings; we’ll never see you!” We did see them three times—exactly the same amount as when we’d stayed in Paris.
We traveled a lot this time through northern and eastern France. Through rural France. Our plans were only partly structured, because most of what we did was drive. We drove on all sorts of roads and visited all sorts of places. Cities Americans seldom hear of (Colmar) and small villages only few can recall (Septvaux—you can find it on the Web!). It was an education of sorts.
The major lesson is that the pattern of rural life is structured quite differently. When we told the uncle and aunt we wanted to visit rural France, the response was “Why? It’s only villages and fields.”
“Precisely,” we thought.
What we didn’t imagine was that the aunt and uncle were speaking literally. You can imagine someone from Manhattan Island saying the same thing about Ohio (although Ohio is in reality a very urbanized, old-industry state). But in the case of the United States, the remark is approximate. Yes, small towns and fields, and along all the American roads you see farms, trailers, barns, small businesses—and the intrusive ugliness of shopping plazas and so forth. In France, at least in the part of the north that we saw, the pattern was literally villages and fields. Where do the farmers live? They live in the villages.
towns; as you drive in the US, you know that a small town is approaching as these isolated plots become increasingly dense, until, finally, you arrive in an American town. Not so in France. You drive along a nicely maintained two-lane road, bordered on both sides by large (American-style) fields, traveled over by the same huge John Deeres you might see in Kansas and Illinois. Villages are sharply differentiated from the fields, and they exist traditional places established for hundreds, and not infrequently, for a thousand years or more.
And in France this pattern of huge American fields and traditional French villages emerges just 30 or 40 miles from downtown Paris, after a suburban ring of 20 miles or so. In the country (and in the suburbs for that matter) we never saw a single consolidated sprawl-type school (see the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s monograph on school sprawl in the US) set outside a village. We drove into the villages to look for the schools—they were there.
There are apparent implications from these choices. Life in France seems to start later in the morning; our landlord’s work day began at 10 am and ended at 6 pm. In the morning, the streets of our suburb were crowded with fathers (yes, fathers) and mothers walking their kids to the schools. And this practice seemed common even in large towns and small cities. We drove to Alsace (in the east, bordering on the Rhine) one morning, passing Reims along the way. Reims, you might recall, is home to that cathedral painted so many times by Monet. We hadn’t planned to stop, but the cathedral was visible from the interstate (the A4) and it pulled us in, about 7:30 in the morning. To our
how many were walking to school and how many to city buses, but it seemed a mix. It was funny—just us, the kids, and the cathedral in the semi-dark.
Do the Math
France is rather well known for having a very centralized education system
(established by Napoleon the first, and stringently centralized by Napoleon III)—and a regimented one. The American model is different—50 state systems all supposedly different (but, in fact, perhaps too distressingly similar in some respects). We probably are less regimented, though schooling has a custodial (or disciplinary) function that seems very much the same around the world, whether Western Europe, North America, or Africa.
Because France has this reputation for centralization and regimentation, I think we’d expected to find massive schools on the American model, just as we found massive fields on the American model. Somehow, the village template has survived the 20th century, as a national organizational norm, prevailing even in the suburbs. Near our rental house, in Montévrain, close to the Disney park (“You must be nuts!” said the uncle), there was a housing boom in progress. Curiously to our eyes, some of these new ‘developments’ included new schools, bakery, beauty shop, community center, churches, post offices, and even light industry and commercial services. Whether this practice was common elsewhere in France, we couldn’t judge—and these were distinctly affluent suburbs. But the examples we saw, and the way the French have sustained traditional villages,
Schumacher put it on the cover of his famous book, “small is beautiful.” This goes some way to explaining why bread, wine, and cheese are so excellent in France. They are produced carefully in comparatively small establishments.
“Small is beautiful”—that slogan is about as close to math as this story is going to get! We have, to be honest, published a study that provides evidence that poor kids learn math better in smaller schools (which the French schools we saw certainly seemed to be) and that rich kids learn math no better in larger schools—at least in the United States, and one must be careful not to over generalize!
Must See Viewing: Être et Avoir (To Be and To Have)
Curiously, the French capital-S State saw fit to fund an extraordinary documentary about the teacher and students (and about their community and families) in a one-room school in rural France, To Be and To Have. Steve Swidler, a rural education colleague at the University of Nebraska and a fellow Francophile, recommended the movie. The filmmaking is artful, moving, and deft. There’s no voice-over narration, just good editing built on hard work and good luck.
Watching this film could be helpful to our own fellow citizens curious about the alleged vacuum of rural life. Steve’s spouse, by the way, teaches math education at the same university, and so there is an authentic math connection after all, in this story. (See the related story on UNL’s Math in the Middle project.) For reviews of the movie, consult the Movie Review Query Engine.
judgment, you’ll have to see the film and agree that it is beautiful!) One reason such a step seems unlikely in the U.S. is that the rural town is not recognized as a cultural institution worthy of preservation here (again, for related commentary see the previously mentioned report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation).
To Be and To Have is just one representation of rural schooling, and it comes from a ‘strange’ land (I’m making one of those awful dual-language puns, the French word for “foreign” being a cognate of “strange”—étrange). Let’s admit it, though—rural
American places have become strangers, too, in their own land.
On the Importance of Seeing Over the Horizon and Returning Home
The experience of France reminded me of our tendency to over-generalize from within the limitations of our everyday lives. Rural places—geographers know this rather well—can be patterned in dramatically different ways, according to historical and cultural prerogatives. I had to travel several thousand miles to understand the reality of such an abstraction.
There’s one realm in which this tendency to over-generalize operates, however, that has fascinated me for a long time. It concerns place, and, in particular, the political states we live in.
All of us in a state—Tennessee, Kentucky, New Mexico, whatever—become, through our work, captives of the way issues and policies and programs are formulated and deployed within our borders. And when teachers and principals undertake doctoral dissertations, they are, for this reason (and it’s a defensible one) likely to frame studies set in the states in which they work. And their committees are likely to approve, in part, for the same reason. After all, education faculty themselves are usually most concerned with the education policies of the state in which their university is located—usually the same state in which the students work.
For these reasons, national or multi-state studies are rare in the dissertation literature in education (especially in mathematics education, but also in rural education). They are, in fact, so rare that a separate field exists in which they can be done: comparative
education, but this field mostly concerns itself with international comparisons, when interstate (in the U.S.) comparisons could prove equally rich.
places, and enact it differently in those places, and also studies of how (in quantitative mode) important variables influence each other differently from state to state. (And, yes, between nations as well; for an interesting example of such a quantitative study in the comparative-education-mode, see Jim Williams’s recent Working Paper for ACCLAIM). Here’s an important word that relates to this durable, and oft-reinforced, tendency not to see beyond the horizon: ontology (the way reality is). We all live in a particular place, and the realities of professional practice that we encounter in living this way impress us strongly. The point of an “ontological condition” is precisely that it imposes such limits. It’s the world’s way of saying to us, “This is how the world is structured. Get over it.” Without intervention, our horizons are limited to our immediate
preoccupations. One reason to read and write, and to conduct research, is to transcend such limitations.
FEATURE
Retreat for Centers for Learning and Teaching (CLTs) in Mathematics Evaluation Report
Vena M. Long and Yan Wang
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), The Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment, and Instruction in Mathematics (ACCLAIM) hosted the first Retreat for Centers for Learning and Teaching (CLT) in mathematics at Whitestone Inn, Paint Rock, Tennessee, on October 11- October 13, 2004. A total of 32 participants from seven Centers, SRI, and the NSF attended the retreat. Among them, 80% of the participants were PIs or Co-PIs. Postdoctoral fellows, internal or external project evaluators, and graduate students accounted for 5% each. Instead of bright fall colors, attendees met with stormy skies, but the rain failed to dampen their enthusiasm. The retreat was arranged as a series of sessions, including an opening session, research presentation, evening panel sessions focused on the past and future, breakout group discussion sessions, and numerous poster sessions. Six discussion sessions were held on a variety of topics, including graduate students programs, distance
education/alternative delivery, and partner school/teacher learning. Stimulating
professional conversations continued throughout the sessions and between sessions, and provided an active atmosphere for participants to discuss common issues broadly and effectively.
Grouws (CSMC), developed an Internet survey to collect feedback from participants. The online survey approach has three advantages over regular paper-based, end-of-conference type surveys: 1) it allows time for participants to reflect upon the questions and the retreat before completing the evaluations; 2) it provides enhanced accessibility to the survey forms; and 3) it permits completion of the evaluation at participants’ convenience. Additionally this mechanism further encouraged use of CLT-Net, an objective of the retreat. CLT members received several e-mail reminders during the weeks following the meeting in an effort to encourage use of the online evaluation.
In the survey, participants were asked to answer nine selected-response questions and were given the opportunity to make written comments about this retreat. The objective of this survey was to measure the success of three specific meeting objectives as detailed in the original proposal. The online evaluation initiative was well received, with an overall response rate of 73%. Many respondents gave valuable written comments about this retreat.
to graduate training, 78% of respondents agreed they now have better understanding; about 63% felt the same about professional development. In addition, 86% of respondents believed that they will use the “ideas” from the other centers in their own center work. Fourteen percent of participants, however, thought that more time should be spent on the issue of professional development programs.
The second specific objective for the meeting was to “establish effective and efficient electronic linkages between and among all CLTs involved in mathematics education.” To evaluate this objective, the survey asked how likely participants were to use CLT-Net in order to continue their involvement in discussions on topics begun at the meeting. More than 90% of the respondents believed that it was likely or definite that they would continue usage, while only 9% said that it was not likely. Fifty-five percent of respondents indicated that they planned to use CLT-Net to share resources discussed at the meeting with other CLT members. These results indicate that CLT-Net will become a stronger linkage among CLT members, and the math CLT retreat was helpful in
promoting continued electronic personal linkages.
The third specific meeting objective was to “investigate the potential for joint research initiatives between/among CLTs.” With this meeting, participants had a chance to discuss potential areas for collaboration. Through these discussions, the participants came to understand what is possible and what is not possible. Ninety percent of
administration (27%), and other center issues (23%). (Since respondents were not limited to choosing one item, the total exceeds 100%.)
On the whole, respondents were generally satisfied with the meeting, with 71% of respondents indicating that the retreat was extremely useful and had met their goals. Comments from the survey reflected the value of this retreat: “I wish we could do this on a regular basis,” while another sounded a more realistic note: “Although I plan on
continuing the dialogue and connections, I wonder how realistic it is to do much of that once we are immersed in our everyday routine…” Another commented, “. . . Retreats like the one in TN allow for that: time and focus.”
The time of year, the beautiful setting, mutual respect among participants and shared concerns resulted in a rich, rewarding experience. The evaluation data indicate that the time was well spent and such conversations should continue. This optimism was tempered by an acknowledgement of the time commitment such collaborations require. Suggestions for follow-up activities encouraged continued sharing and collaboration, yet stressed the need to connect these activities with existing commitments such as PI meetings, etc. Interconnected national advisory boards, graduate student retreats,
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING IN OUR NECK OF THE WOODS
Teacher Development Initiative Update Karen Mitchell, Marshall University
On December 15, 2004, the members of the Appalachian Association of
Mathematics Teacher Educators (AAMTE) ratified the organization’s constitution and bylaws. This action represents another step toward establishing a thriving regional organization that is in a position to influence key decisions associated with mathematics education. The general purpose of AAMTE is to promote all aspects of the improvement of mathematics teacher education in central Appalachia, with special attention paid to the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Specifically, its goals are to:
A. Encourage, support, and publicize quality programs for prospective mathematics teachers at all levels.
B. Facilitate communication among mathematics teacher educators at the elementary, secondary, community college, college, and university levels.
C. Facilitate collaboration among mathematics teacher educators who are members of different educational administrative units, such as departments of mathematics and departments of education.
mathematics at all levels.
E. Work collaboratively with other associations and organizations concerned with the preparation and professional development of mathematics teachers.
F. Provide leadership opportunities for mathematics teacher educators in a broader mathematics education community;
G. Work cooperatively with local, state, and regional agencies to enhance the mathematical, pedagogical, and clinical preparation of prospective teachers of mathematics at all levels.
H. Encourage research related to mathematics teacher education, especially research which identifies factors that contribute to improving the preparation and
mathematics teaching. Both regional and national presenters led the two-hour workshop sessions that occurred on Saturday.
For the first time we are soliciting proposals from the members of the regional mathematics education community to speak at the faculty conference, Mathematics Teacher Preparation in Appalachia. This year’s conference will be held in Lexington, KY, on September 23-24, 2005. The theme for the conference is, in the broadest sense, field experiences. Proposals that address the nature of the experiences that provide the best preparation for mathematics teachers who work in Appalachia and teach at grades 5-16 are appropriate for this conference. Listed below are some examples of topics for proposals that would support the conference theme.
• Innovative rural field experiences for pre-service students. • Faculty mentoring at the college level.
• Teaching seminars for graduate students.
• Coaching and mentoring for middle or high school teachers.
• Unique collaborations among mathematics and education departments
that result in successful field experiences.
• Professional learning communities.
Faculty members who are already on the Teacher Development mailing list will receive a letter providing future conference detail. Individuals who are not on this mailing list but are interested in making a presentation at future conferences may request information by sending an email to [email protected].
Academy emphasized the need for action plans that had a clear correlation among the roles, goals, strategies, and forms of assessment and that provided leadership
opportunities for all team members. This year all eleven teams are meeting regularly and making progress with the goals established in their action plans. Preservice students and higher education faculty are better integrated into the activities of the teams. Members of the PDTs will be participating in the February conference and will be invited to present at the faculty conference in September.
Capacity Building Update Vena Long, PI
The Capacity Building initiative of ACCLAIM is being kept busy working with two groups of doctoral students as both cohort one and cohort two are working on course work. Preparation for each new semester begins long before students begin coursework. Current activity includes:
Four professors are trying distance teaching for the first time this semester. Xin Ma, University of Kentucky, is teaching a research course; Jeff Connor, Ohio University, is teaching an advanced calculus course; Jim Gleason, University of Tennessee, is teaching a discrete mathematics course; and Mark Taylor,
University of Tennessee, is conducting a doctoral seminar on research in teacher education. Gleason and Taylor are using a new technology called a
augment prepared slides, do math on the fly, and so on, with more ease and flexibility than with a graphics tablet or smartboard.
Doctoral committees are beginning to meet to plan comprehensive exams for Cohort 1. Sample questions have been submitted by professors who have taught the cohort and will be used as models by the various committees. Comps will be scheduled throughout the summer months.
Several members of Cohort 1 attended the recent AMTE meeting in Dallas, and most of Cohort 2 is scheduled to attend NCTM in April. These professional opportunities add a rich dimension to any program of study, but particularly a non-residential program such as ACCLAIM's.
The National Science Foundation's annual principal investigator meeting was February 7-10 in Washington, DC. Cohort 1 was represented by Sue Nichols and Barbara Buckner, and Cohort 2 was represented by Jamie Fugitt.
Research Initiative Update
NCTM President Visits Appalachian School Jim Schultz
Cathy Seeley, President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, recently visited Vinton County (Ohio) High School. She remarked, “It was great to visit with teachers working to make a difference to students facing the unique challenges of life in Appalachia. The school is impressive, and it’s heartening to see students in rural America having access to the same resources as students in more affluent suburban schools. I appreciated the openness and warmth of everyone I met at the school. They made me feel right at home.”
She spent a morning observing classes and talking with Assistant Superintendent Marianne Hale, Principal Kevin Waddell, Math Department Chair Cici Black, and mathematics teachers Kendra Armstrong, Kay Casto, Melissa Keck, Nathanial Kight, Amanda Wagh, and Tony Xenos.
During her visit to OU she also addressed the newly-formed Ohio University Council of Teachers of Mathematics in a presentation entitled, “What it takes for all students to succeed in mathematics,” discussing the changes educators need to make in the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. We can all learn something from these committed and energetic students.” Her busy schedule also included meetings with faculty and students. Her visit was sponsored by the Morton Chair of Mathematics Education, Jim Schultz.
NCTM President Cathy Seeley speaks about her experience in the Peace Corps in Africa with Ghanaian students Ahmed Amihere, Godwin Dogbey, and James Adabor.
RESOURCE REVIEW
The Role of Education: Promoting the Economic and Social Vitality of Rural America.
insight into the important and often fragile relationship between rural schools and communities in America. The report comprises nine articles divided into three area-specific sections: (1) Education, Human Capital, and the Local Economy, (2) Links between Rural Schools and Communities, and (3) Creating Successful Rural Schools and Students. This report can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat at SRDC:
http://srdc.msstate.edu/publications/ruraleducation.pdf
For a free hard copy of this report contact Robert Gibbs, [email protected].
UPCOMING EVENTS
Teaching OUTSIDE the Box Conference
NCTM 2005 Annual Meeting and Exposition
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, hosted by California Mathematics Council-Southern Section and its local affiliates, will hold its annual mathematics
conference in Anaheim, California from April 6 – 9, 2005. A research pre-session, sponsored by the NCTM Research Committee and the Special Interest Group on
Research in Mathematics Education of the American Educational Research Association, will be held April 4-6, 2005. You can obtain information and register by visiting
http://www.nctm.org/meetings/anaheim/#registration.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
High Quality Teaching: Providing for Rural Teachers’ Professional Development Craig and Aimee Howley
Rural school districts face unique challenges in cultivating a teaching force that possesses subject-matter expertise, a willingness to undertake difficult professional work at the local level, and attentiveness to rural practices and cultures. At the same time, many rural schools harbor significant strengths that districts might draw upon to foster high-quality teaching. Scholars Aimee Howley and Craig B. Howley examine this dynamic and suggest the need for professional development practices that are responsive to rural circumstances in a new policy brief from AEL, High-Quality Teaching:
http://www.ael.org/page.htm?&id=966&pd=res8721 PDF document is at:
http://www.ael.org/snaps/PBHigh-QualityTeaching.pdf
Math in the Middle Begins
The University of Nebraska, courtesy of the National Science Foundation, has recently launched “Math in the Middle”—the acronym is M2—and, like ACCLAIM, it has a serious rural focus. Many such efforts purport to “serve” rural patrons, but only rarely do they propose an interest in the circumstances and meanings of rural
communities.
Readers familiar with ACCLAIM’s commitments will understand this point (the usual thrust is simply to improve math teaching and learning without much regard for productive, or generative, local ways of being rural). Math in the Middle is different. It not only “serves” teachers from the remote western part of the state, but it incorporates a rural education workshop in its service to the project. M2 is also aware of ACCLAIM’s efforts and approaches, partly through reputation and personal connection, but also through publications and through the participation of several ACCLAIM scholars in M2’s first Rural Education Workshop. Project leaders Jim Lewis and Ruth Heaton are
(see the review of the rural professional development literature announced elsewhere in this issue).
The affinity with ACCLAIM is reflected in other ways, as well. M2 is sponsoring professional development activities, like other Mathematics-Science Partnerships funded by NSF, but M2 is committed to helping teachers involved in the program complete masters degrees. Like ACCLAIM, then, its form of professional development includes coursework leading to further credentiation. This decision is one way to bring coherence to professional development activities, but also to ensure an influence on participants’ career trajectories. Further, M2 operates a research effort that prominently intends to investigate issues of the sort that interest ACCLAIM. Finally, the M2 national advisory board includes a member of the ACCLAIM Management Team to advise the project on rural matters.
Readers can learn more about the work of Math in the Middle from the project website. Materials from the first Rural Education Workshop should be available soon at the site.
Schools and Communities as Partners
To make a community vibrant and progressive, youth and adults need to work together to address the needs of community. While models vary, communities are choosing three major ways to integrate with schools, especially in small rural areas. The first approach uses the school as a community center. In this model, the school becomes the lifeblood of the community and a major resource.
The second approach uses the community as an empirical learning environment. Students help the community by conducting needs assessments, researching
environmental issues, and monitoring land-use patterns, for example.
The third approach is the school-based enterprise method. The school encourages development of entrepreneurial skills with students in the community. Through programs like this, students have started businesses like shoe repair, day-care centers, and
delicatessens.
The ultimate test of community and school approaches is the impact they have on the lives of rural youth and adults over an extended partnership. Changing the fundamental nature of interaction between schools and communities helps to prepare rural youth for their futures and to develop skilled leaders for tomorrow.
Full article: http://www.cfra.org/newsletter/current.htm
A message from one of our scholars
I've started a blog for commentary on rural education issues. The first one contains my 2004 Rural Education Awards. I only gave four awards: Best Rural Education Report, Best Medium Reassignment, Best New Rural Education Research Center, and Best Use of Rural Education in a Campaign. You can access it at http://mrruraled.blogspot.com/
PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITIES
Would we be interested in your work? The answer is yes if the words “rural” and “mathematics” appear often in your manuscript. We welcome distinctive and non-trendy scholarship. Empirical work (quantitative or qualitative) is a priority, but we will
consider theoretical pieces, historical research or biography, and very well argued commentary as well. Contact Craig Howley at [email protected] or Jim Schultz at [email protected] for more information.
DISCLAIMER
The Rural Mathematics Educator is produced at Ohio University and published electronically by the Research Initiative of the Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment, and Instruction in Mathematics (ACCLAIM).
Office: 740-593-9869 Fax: 740-593-0477
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://acclaim.coe.ohiou.edu
ACCLAIM is funded by the National Science Foundation as a Center for Learning and Teaching. The Center is a partnership of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (Lexington), Marshall University (Huntington, WV), Ohio University (Athens), the University of Kentucky (Lexington), the University of Louisville (Louisville), the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), and West Virginia University (Morgantown).
