Chinese Immigrant Parent and the BC Math School System

Presenter/Guest Speaker: Qiaochu (Joy) Xu, UBC Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy Masters Student
Date: March 10th, 2022
Host: Dr Cynthia Nicol

How Chinese Immigrant Parents’ Expectations and Aspirations for their Children’s Math Learning Interact with British Columbia’s School Systems and Curricula

In this SyMETRI session, Qiaochu (Joy) presented her M.Ed. Capstone project about the Chinese immigrant parents’ expectations and aspirations for their children’s math learning interacting with British Columbia’s School Systems and Curricula. She shared the voices from the Chinese immigrant community, exploring what they feel is working well and what seems to be lacking, and where they place their children in the two education and value systems of China and Canada. Chinese parents in this study have a relatively high level of engagement in their children’s math education, devoting themselves to helping their children succeed inside and outside the school domain.

The Chinese parents in this study suggested that their children would benefit from faster-paced math classes and increased challenge to the current level. The four families that participated in this study hope to learn better ways for understanding the curriculum and to find effective ways to communicate with their child’s math teacher.

During the presentation, other issues faced by immigrant parents were also raised. Some of these were lacking language proficiency to provide homework support and peer pressure from members of their Chinese immigrant community and the broader Canadian community.

This interactive presentation offered an opportunity for participating educators to share their thoughts and experiences when working with students from immigrant families.

Poster used when recruiting participants

Sense-making in Learning Mathematics across Languages and Countries

Presenter/Guest Speaker: Tsubasa Saito, UBC Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy Doctoral Candidate
Date: February 24th, 2022
Host: Dr Cynthia Nicol

During the session, Tsubasa shared some of his findings from his doctoral dissertation that explores how multilingual students learn/do mathematics and how they interpret word problems in different languages. The study focuses on multilingual students who simultaneously learn at two different schools in two different languages.

The interviews with 14 multilingual students learning in a Canadian school and a weekend Japanese school, show that some students believe there is no difference, other than languages, in learning mathematics between the two schools, whereas others describe learning mathematics as “deep” in the Japanese school, contrasting to “wide” in Canadian schools. While Japanese mathematics classrooms often explore mathematical concepts in the class that is characterized by a problem-centered approach (Takahashi, 2021), according to the students, Canadian mathematics is more applicable to real life.

These contrasting perspectives can be explained by different features of curricula and pedagogies between the two countries. Additionally, their discourses in the mathematical tasks support the idea of suspension of sense-making (Schoenfeld, 1991), and the students irregularly suspend their sense-making when creating the word problems. Lastly, this study also confirmed that students utilized their fluid and flexible language repertoire to learn/do mathematics.

 

Discussion: Japanese math is "deep & narrow"

Discussion: Possible reasons why Japanese mathematics is “deep & narrow” for students

Discussion: Japanese math "shallow & wide"

Discussion: Possible reasons why Japanese mathematics is NOT “shallow & wide” for the students

 

Reference
Schoenfeld, A. H. (1991). On mathematics as sense-making: An informal attack on the unfortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In J. F. Voss, D. N. Perkins, & J. W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311–343). New York: Routledge.
Takahashi, A. (2021). Teaching mathematics through problem-solving: A pedagogical approach from Japan. New York: Routledge.