The End...?

Looking back through my previous blog posts I was reminded of many orchard mornings of artistic and embodied approaches to math that we explored together. My favourite activity in the garden was when we tried to find colour matches with paint swatches. Doing this activity really drew my focus to the small details of our environment rather than seeing the garden as a whole. Our discussion afterward was about the Western tendency toward quantification, even when it comes to the natural world, which exists outside of our systems of mathematics. This was likely the discussion that began to shape what would become my inquiry topic of Indigenous approaches to mathematics.

Another influential class for me was with our guest speaker Dr. Kathryn Ricketts. Her philosophy of being a voice and body to tell the stories of others who have been silenced or ignored was so moving and valuable. Then, when she had us work in groups to make pedagogical suggestions with artistic objects it really showcased our creativity and how much we had learned as a class. Honestly, it was a moment of pride and achievement for me that she could hand me and my peers a pile of coloured popsicle sticks and we could construct several different pedagogical uses for them within a few minutes. 

The main thing I'm taking away from Inquiry I is inspiration. We explored so many foundational ideas about approaching math from embodied, artistic, interdisciplinary, and multicultural perspectives and I'm looking forward to expanding on these ideas in the next chapter of this program.