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One of the suggested activities in "Connecting
Math to Our Lives" for promoting equity at the school site is to have students
analyze all the biographies in the school library on the basis of gender,
race, class or disability. Students then categorize these and use percentages,
fractions, and bar graphs to help them describe the library's biography
collection.
This is what I*earn teacher Patti McLain from Almond Avenue School in Livermore, California, set out to do with her bilingual first, second and third graders. During the course of this project she involved parents in the process, teamed up with a partner class from another school, got children to gather data from both school and city libraries, and had children write their biographies. You can read a report that Patti compiled in January, soon after she and her students had embarked on this project. Therefore the report reflects the planning and some of the early activities of the group. In the meantime the project has taken many interesting twists and turns, and has changed quite a bit. |
Promoting Equity at Our School Site
Several classrooms of first, second and third grade students at Almond Avenue School, Livermore, CA began the Orillas Math project in January, 1998. The original announcement suggested students "analyze all the biographies in the school library on the basis of gender, race, class or disability. Students then categorize these and use percentages, fractions and bar graphs to help them describe the library's biography collection." As the project at Almond School unfolds many new issues and learning opportunities are arising. Here are a few of the highlights:
Young children did not understand the term biography. It was introduced around the holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr. as this led into an easy discussion of "stories about people". This was followed up with other biographies that were highlighted in adopted reading series, Open Court, such as Jackie Robinson.
Once children "heard biographies" they came together to look and have "hands-on" time browsing a biography book. They were told to look for picture, for key words, names, etc. Then they were asked if they could determine if the book was about a male or female (gender). They were most interested in knowing if the person lived around them, was here now, and quite surprised that most of the people were dead. They created a new classification: dead or alive.
The next time the children were asked to look at race. This was very confusing for young children. Color is comprehensible, race was difficult. Martin Luther King was black, but also African American. We found the children comparing their colors of skin and getting very frustrated with what was white, brown, light brown, etc. Yet, the teachers felt it was an important issue to pursue.
| The children tried to categorize the famous people: artist, authors, inventors, athletes, etc. This was very confusing again. Some people were more than one thing. For example, Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, inventor and writer. They were not sure how to keep track of this, yet it seemed to be very interesting information to the children. It seemed to fit with "when I grow up I want to be a…," to which children of this age relate. It also became apparent that the children had really never heard of most the people in the books. In a book about Jimmy Carter, his Habitat for Humanity project was highlighted. Looking at that information, the children classified him as a "builder". |  |
It was decided to find "buddy" classes and together
to data collection at a larger public library. (We wanted to see if the
pattern for books was the same in a school library, branch (city library
and large urban library). We hooked up with immersion classes from Fairmont
Elementary in San Francisco. All children at Almond School learn Spanish.
The majority of the participants from Fairmont Elementary are native Spanish
speakers. We wanted the children to have the opportunity to work with buddies
in another language, to let each be an expert when the language was needed
and to come to agreement on classifying people from their different perspectives.
After arrangements with the San Francisco Main Library (Children's section),
a date of February 20, 1998 has been set for the "count".
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The teachers from these schools met on Thursday, January 29, 1998. We discussed what had already been done in the process and what would be done jointly, including:
