Presenter/Guest Speaker: Amanda Fritzlan, 3rd Year EDCP Doctoral student

Date/Time: January 30, 2019, 12:30-1:30 pm

Venue: Scarfe Room 1209, UBC

Host: Dr Cynthia Nicol

Amanda describes her presentation as follows:

For this paper, I created a conversation between recent research into culturally responsive mathematics and Canadian curriculum theorist Chambers’ (2008) proposed a curriculum of place. Chambers’ challenges education researchers to write from the places where they live and work. She describes four conceptual realms: a different sense of time, enskillment, education of attention, and wayfinding.

Chambers (2008) connects a different sense of time to her realization that many people had lived where she lives, in southern Alberta, before her, and that it takes people a very long time to learn how to live with the land in a way that they are nourished by the land. Enskillment, the second element of Chambers’ curriculum of place, assumes that people are dependent on the land and communities where they live. Learned skills become part of who a person is as they are developed in relation to surviving in place.“Through education of attention, each generation learns to notice the clues to a place, the clues through which each generation must learn how to live here, and the clues by which what it means to live here, may be revealed” (Chambers, 2008, p. 122). Wayfinding, the final realm this conception of a curriculum of place, involves learning about places as you go, learning from the land, and through multiple literacies (eg. singing, dancing, storytelling, hunting). Each of these four elements of Chambers’ curriculum of place creates a vocabulary for thinking about interactions and common threads between different culturally responsive mathematics education researchers’ work.

Reference   

Chambers, C. (2008). Where are we? Finding common ground in a curriculum of place. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies,6(2), 113–128.