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Digital Mathematics Storytelling in Newcomer Communities

During Spring Break of 2024, children from recently immigrated families took part in a weeklong Superhero Digital Math Storytelling Camp at a community center focused on newcomer communities. As part of an ITEST CAREER research grant, this project focused on engaging children in crafting narrative and counternarratives that explored the ways that mathematics connected to their real-life experiences. In this camp, the children used the superhero genre to create their own superheroes, crafting origin stories that become counternarratives to push back on the ways that the children have had to navigate the confusing rules of assimilating to the USA. Many of the children are from families seeking asylum in the USA, so their superhero narratives alluded to their experience with war, military occupation, displacement, and trans-national identity. Through a focus on developing a storytelling community to explore mathematics identity and counter storytelling, the children ended up creating comics and videos featuring their superheroes. Utilizing a critical digital literacies framework, the children learned how to create comic stories, shoot, and edit video, record voiceovers, and ultimately create the story they wanted to tell. And through the use of storycircles, in which children shared their stories in progress and got feedback, the children were able to create counter narratives using their superheroes as protagonists and antiheros to solve real world mathematics problems.

Pillar 1: Innovative Use of Technologies in Learning and Teaching

The children in the project engaged in Digital Mathematics Storytelling. This meant that they had to write and digitally record an audio narrative. Then, they had to storyboard, film, and then edit the visual narrative. And finally, they had to edit it all together into a cohesive video or story. Through this, the children were engaged in innovative use of technologies in the ways they collaborated, planned, shot, and edited their final stories.

Pillar 2: Partnerships for Career and Workforce Preparation.

Throughout the Superhero Digital Mathematics Storytelling camp, children were able to explore the ways media literacy connected to potential careers. The children worked with professional media and content creators to write and record their narratives, plan out their story, and ultimately, shoot and edit their final product. This exposure to critical digital literary skills helped these children, aged 7-14, develop quick expertise in digital content creation and learn how digital media professionals operate.

Pillar 3: Strategies for Equity in STEM Education

This camp centered on children who are marginalized in their school mathematics settings because of linguistic, cultural, or socioeconomic barriers. We emphasized mathematics play and problem solving and how these can help children connected back to their community and family funds of mathematical knowledge. And because many of the participants were reluctantly displaced from their homeland, this emphasis on mathematics helps them only develop a long-term positive mathematics identity.
A flying superhero confronts a supervillain, saying "Return it to me". The supervilian, pointing a gun at the superhero, thinks to himself, "The angle where I have to put the weapon is 90° and a power of 70% to shoot you down.
Discipline(s)
Mathematical sciences
Target Gradespan(s)
Elementary school (K-5)
Target Participant(s)
Youth / students
Project Setting(s)
Informal Education
Category
Youth-Based
Body

 

2024 ONLINE PROGRAM

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