Thursday, May 2, 5:20-6:00PM (part of An Evening of Indigenous Childhood)
Dr. Karen Martin, Southern Cross University, Australia
Title: Aboriginal children and families
Location: First Nations House of Learning
Aboriginal Australian scholar, Dr. Martin presents a conceptual model of Indigenous early childhood education within the contexts of where young Aboriginal children live and learn, considering these as multiple rather than dual or binary. It also proposes these multiple contexts encompass the past, the present and the future and are comprised of the dimensions that are relational, cultural, political and spatial. It acknowledges that Western contexts are equally multiple and equally multi-dimensional and so the points and places where Aboriginal contexts and Western contexts interface are fragile and yet they are potentially the strongest points and places where transactions and transformations can, and do, occur. The conceptual model unpacks the nature and quality of these transactions and transformations regarding the teaching and learning of young Aboriginal children and the engagement of their families and communities.
Friday, May 3, 9:00-10:00AM
Professor Eve Gregory, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Title: Learning to belong: Young children learning through faith in new London Communities
Location: First Nations House of Learning
Faith plays an important role in the lives of many young children whose families have migrated to the UK. These children become literate and often bi- or multilingually literate during faith services, at their faith classes and in their homes. In this presentation, I invite colleagues into the lives of sixteen families in London whose children regularly practise their faith. The families are from the Bangladeshi Muslim, the Ghanaian Pentecostal, the Tamil Hindu and the Polish Catholic communities. Through a number of video clips we see ways in which learning to belong to a faith is intricately intertwined with the learning of language and literacy, social, cultural and aesthetic skills. Finally, I ask whether and in what ways children might be able to transfer these skills and knowledge into the classroom and what teachers might do to foster this. The work forms part of an ESRC funded project ‘Becoming literate in faith settings: Language and literacy learning in the lives of new Londoners (2009-2013) and is portrayed in detail in our web-site: www.belifs.co.uk.
Saturday, May 4, 9:00-10:00AM
Professor Terezinha Nunes, Oxford University
Title: What is involved in modeling the world with mathematics?
Location: Digital Literacy Center
Mathematics is a tool for understanding the world and it should be available to everyone. In this presentation, the units of thinking for modeling the world with mathematics are identified as quantities, relations, and numbers. In the conceptualization of each of these elements, there are cultural variations and logical invariants. There is some degree of independence between children’s understanding of these three elements, and what is achieved first depends on how learning takes place.
The heuristic value of this analysis will be illustrated by considering children’s mathematical knowledge acquired in and out of school. When mathematical knowledge is developed mostly outside school, children’s understanding of quantities and relations between quantities is ahead of their number knowledge; their numerical manipulations are dependent on their understanding of quantities. When mathematical knowledge is developed predominantly in school, children’s skills in manipulating numbers are often disconnected from their understanding of quantities and relations between quantities; they are easily misled by superficial problem characteristics into choosing the wrong calculations to solve a problem.
Two important lessons from this analysis are that disparities in the understanding of quantities, relations and number are part of development and that schools could take on the role of promoting the coordination of these elements through teaching.