Coordinator: Dean's Office
Category: Core Course
Instructors: Prof. Aniket Sule & Dr. Durgaprasad Karnam
Course Day and Time: Monday (2 PM to 4 PM) and Friday (2 PM to 5 PM)
Starting from January 5, 2024
Coordinator: Dean's Office
Category: Core Course
Instructors: Dr. Narendra Deshmukh and Dr. Kalpana Kharade
Course Day and Time: Tuesday (11 AM to 1 PM) and Friday (11 AM to 1 PM)
Starting from January 9, 2024
11Mon
Coordinator: Dean's Office
https://badal.hbcse.tifr.res.in/index.php/s/RiKxwCSxEGJMzA7
15Fri
Coordinator: Dean's Office
Ms. Jayasree Subramanian
MATHEMATICAL EXPLORATIONS AND ‘TALK’ AT THE MARGINS
The central concern of this study is ways of mitigating the marginalising effects of mathematics especially for those students who are already marginalised due to their socio-economic and educational backgrounds and “recentering the margins”. Literature highlights the marginalising effects of “school mathematics tradition” with its focus on one right answer, and the stylised language of mathematics with a prevalence of symbols. Moving away from these we sought to design and implement mathematical explorations that enable a rich mathematical experience even in marginalised or low resource contexts. We started with flexibility and accessibility as key design principles guiding task design and identified task features that enable flexibility and accessibility. Following a first-person-classroom-based approach to research, we facilitated and observed students in a low resource context as they engaged with mathematical explorations. We observed students engaging in practices that literature identifies as elements of mathematical thinking. We noted the prevalence of oral communication in informal language and the near absence of symbolisation and formalisation as distinctive features that mark their engagement with such tasks. Moving away from the deficit perspectives that fail to acknowledge the mathematical in such conversations, we sought to define more accommodating acceptability criteria for what constitutes mathematical discourse. Additionally, we look at what it implies for the teacher to enable flexibility without compromising on core disciplinary constraints.