Crossing Boundaries- Creating Connections

Week 31

Polymath

I feel like I’ve been harping on about the same thing with most of my blogs: if you don’t personally embody change and development, your teacher practice will be inauthentic. What do you think? It’s a tough ask: to be challenged about social media, cultural responsiveness, how you conduct yourself, how you relate to others. There’s a lot to be challenged about as a person in order for you to be an effective teacher.

I’m a High School Maths teacher and luckily I incorporate an interdisciplinary approach because I used to be a Chemistry teacher. We all have different backgrounds and I believe it adds to our teaching practice. For me, I feel hypocritical if I’m not practicing what I teach in the real world - I’m using and experimenting with mathematical models outside the classroom and if we are to utilise an interdisciplinary approach in our teaching, I believe we’d need to at least try it out and experiment in our lives first. And since we can’t know everything, working with people especially those who have different backgrounds can link certain things together, you otherwise wouldn’t (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2016).

Higher Education - Ultra Spiritual Life episode 58

For Maths:

• Physics - all of it.
• Chemistry - reaction rates, mathematical rules for chemical patterns
• Biology - population distribution
• History - how discoveries were made, how discoveries impacted math
• English - Reports, understanding word problems
• Business - Decision making and uncertainty, mathematical models
• Art and music - Patterns, formulae
• P.E - tracking, planning, coordinating groups

Strangely, I’ve been exploring using maths with P.E. I’ve been experimenting creating a maths curriculum around rugby. I have a senior lower ability class who struggle with engagement but love sports. Almost all our topics could be coordinated into a rugby themed year! While not strictly working with P.E, they could provide support about background information.

Our school has been working to collaborate junior maths with science to varying degrees of success. I’ve found the best fields have been statistics and measurement. There’s plenty to improve on here. As ACRLog (2016) has noted, many go into collaborative interdisciplinary projects without the first ounce of training how to do so effectively. A common goal, a suitable communication system and environment to work together and workable, teachable attitudes seems to be the key requirements. At the moment, we have a good attitude with our team, but little direction from management about the common goal, nor adequate environmental support. So where to from there?

But I also have to be a bit of a grinch.

In Maths Education circles, they have found maths education goals bifurcate into practical maths and specialised maths (Sullivan, 2011). If we press too hard for application (and I love application), students fail to transfer those skills to other problem types and this in fact encourages them NOT to think interdisciplinary because they haven’t struggled with the topic abstractly enough to apply it to multiple fields.

Interesting paradox.

REFERENCES

ACRLog. (2015). A Conceptual Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Retrieved from http://acrlog.org/2015/05/14/a-conceptual-model-for-interdisciplinary-collaboration

American Association of Colleges of Nursing.(2016). Interdisciplinary Education and Practice. Retrieved from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/publications/position/interdisciplinary-education-and-practice

JP (2017, May 1). Higher Education - Ultra Spiritual Life episode 58 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8utmmWoBSBY

Sullivan, P. (2011). Teaching mathematics: Using research-informed strategies. Retrieved from https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=aer