Notice, Wonder, Feel, Act, and Reimagine as a Path Toward Social Justice in Data Science Education

In this paper, we introduce Notice, Wonder, Feel, Act, and Reimagine (NWFAR) to promote social justice in data science (DS) education. NWFAR draws on intersectional feminist DS to scaffold critical perspectives towards systems of power and oppression and attend to students' experiences in designs for learning. NWFAR adds three practices that are typically not emphasized in learning designs for DS: feel- engaging emotions and the physical body; act-challenging, inspiring, or informing others towards change; and reimagine-envisioning how data, data methods, and data technologies could pursue different problems, solutions, and perspectives. We illustrate NWFAR through two design-based research projects from prior empirical work. Through these two examples, we demonstrate what thinking with NWFAR could look like in practice and highlight future possibilities for learning. We conclude with a discussion that focuses on the reimagining dimension, in which we highlight social justice oriented theories

Keeping pace with innovations in data visualizations: A commentary for mathematics education in times of crisis

המטרה: לבחון את פוטנציאל תרומת השימוש בייצוגי נתונים חדשניים (data visualizations) באמצעי התקשורת בזמן משבר כמו מגפת הקורונה על הוראת מתמטיקה בבתי ספר. עיקרי הדברים: המחקר מציג שלוש דוגמות לייצוגי נתונים חדשניים להוראת מתמטיקה. תרומתם מוערכת בחיבור בין-תחומי של מתמטיקה, אמנות וספרות; העלאת מודעות לממדים חברתיים ורגשיים של נתונים וקישור הלמידה למציאות החיים של התלמידים; וכן יצירת הזדמנויות חדשות ללמידה על קשרים מתמטיים וייצוגים שונים של נתונים. המחקר קורא להעשיר את הוראת מקצוע המתמטיקה באמצעות ייצוגי נתונים חדשניים המשלבים מולטימדיה, אינטראקטיביות וסיפור, ובכך לקשר את הלמידה לחוויות החיים של התלמידים ולפתוח דיונים רחבים יותר על מתמטיקה וחברה.

Keeping pace with innovations in data visualizations: A commentary for mathematics education in times of crisis

The mathematical medium of data visualization and other data representations (DV) has served as a primary means of communicating about the COVID-19 crisis. DVs about the pandemic are highly visible across news journalism and include an increasingly innovative and diverse set of representational forms. These representational forms employ multimodal, interactive, and narrative elements, among others, that create new possibilities for data storytelling. Building on current efforts to expand the teaching and learning of data practices in K-12 mathematics education, we argue that innovative DVs create new opportunities for teaching and learning mathematics, particularly during times of crisis. We illustrate our argument using three examples of innovative DVs from news journalism. We discuss how these DVs could serve as complementary resources alongside conventional graphs to support students as they use mathematics and mathematical representations to make sense of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Our commentary seeks to bring current trends in data representation to bear in mathematics education. Leveraging such trends offers artifacts useful for teaching and opens up space for elevating emotion and experience as important aspects of mathematics curricula

Mapping the effects of policy on mathematics teacher education

This paper is closed access.Changes in school mathematics curricula, pedagogy and assessment, and as a consequence the pressure for changes in initial teacher preparation, are consequences both of government policy initiatives and pressure from unofficial agents such as the research community, teachers and others, though with great variation across the world. In the case of England, it has resulted in strong regulation, including inspection, of initial teacher education too. In this article, I draw on sociological theory to help in mapping the relations between official and unofficial agents and in interpreting the effects on mathematics teacher educators, in particular. The article draws in the main on the changing position in England over the last decade or so, and a case study analysis is carried out of a key official document to illustrate the application of theoretical tools provided by sociologists and others for examining the relations between agents and agencies and on their consequences. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V