Week 2

    This week I chose to read the article “Tactile Construction of Mathematical Meaning: Benefits for Visually Impaired and Sighted Pupils” by Stylianidou and Nardi (2019).  The article summarizes the study conducted by the authors with elementary math classrooms in the UK.  The goal of the study was to determine the impacts of tactile learning on both sighted and visually impaired (VI) students.  Traditionally, visually impaired students are provided with adapted tasks and materials that are typically used for sighted students.  These adaptations are often limited, and can be exclusionary rather than inclusive.

STOP - An example of an adaptation with limitations is making use of counters with different textures that would represent the different coloured counters typically used for sighted students.  This can lead to a processing overload for VI students and complicates communication with their sighted peers during the mathematical task. In order to overcome these limitations, the authors suggest transforming the visual task to an auditory task.  This would allow students to experience the task with the same sense, and improve communication between students.  This made me pause in my reading and think about a couple of things.  One, as someone that is sighted, I am incredibly unaware of how VI students are interpreting the adaptations that are being provided.  I honestly would have assumed that having different textures to represent colours would be a great adaptation, and not even considered how hard it would be to communicate that information with someone who is using a different sense.  The other thing I thought about was how many of my students have some form of impairment (physical and/or cognitive) and whether it’s possible to have a truly universally inclusive math task?  As a teacher, how do you ensure that the math tasks/problems are inclusive of all when there are so many considerations to keep in mind?

The tactile learning task that was studied, involved the exploration of shapes through touch.  In particular, a shape that is a circle minus a circular segment (see the figure below!).  Both sighted and VI students were asked to describe the attributes of the shape using touch, with sighted students also using their sense of sight.  The authors were interested in determining if vision may generate a misinterpretation of the shape's attributes, since at first glance the shape appears to be a circle.  They were also interested in whether touch would generate a more accurate and detailed interpretation of the shape.  

After analyzing the results, the authors concluded that tactile exploration of the shapes lead to better inclusion of VI students within typical math classrooms, while simultaneously benefitting sighted pupils by changing their perception of the shapes.  Both VI and sighted students were able to distinguish the defining features of Shape X through touch, but the sighted students had a difficult time noticing the flat edge with just their vision.  The contributions of the VI student were noted to be “practical” and “refreshing”, and were used by the teacher to further the class discussion.  They propose that designing tasks that allow all students to experience mathematics through the same sensory tool will create more inclusive classrooms and challenge ableism within mathematics.

STOP - The conclusions of the authors in this article support the ideas found in the introduction to this week’s topic.  Students with a sensory impairment can provide a different perception of the same pattern/task/problem that students without the sensory impairment may otherwise have missed.  This reminded me of the Antonsen video from last week, where a change in perception was linked to developing a deeper understanding.  It made me wonder, if multi-sensory experiences are helpful in changing perceptions, how do we ensure that students with a sensory impairment also get to experience multi-sensory learning?  How do we support them in developing multiple perceptions if a multi-sensory experience isn’t an option? 

While I appreciate that multi-sensory learning opportunities lead to increased understanding amongst all students, I still have the following questions:

1. Is the concept of multi-sensory learning in math being taught within teacher training programs?  It definitely wasn’t when I went through about 15 years ago, and I’ve not heard any of my younger colleagues talking about it.  

2. Where can teachers find resources or information on incorporating multi-sensory tasks within their classrooms? 

3. How do we incorporate these multi-sensory tasks in a sensitive way so as to celebrate the different perspectives of the impaired students without making them feel targeted, or singled out unfairly?

Activity Discussion

For the activity this week, my youngest child explored the data within snack sized smarties boxes.  When it’s not Halloween, the candy selection isn’t great in my town!  We started by opening just one box, and counting up the colours and then put them into a bar graph.  You can see her work in the photo below. 

Eventually we determined that the average number of smarties in a snack size box is 10, and that the colour distribution is completely random.  However, for some reason she ended up with mostly brown, purple and pink.  She also noticed that within each colour group, some of the smarties are faded while others are more intensely coloured.  Sadly we ran out of time to explore that further.  

I also made (and played with) a couple of hexaflexagons out of paper.  It was really hard at first, as it turns out I can’t fold an equilateral triangle to save my life.  I did however, create a lot of right triangles which then fold up into squares.  They don’t flex in the same way as a hexaflexagon, but I still thought they were pretty neat.  I did eventually master the triangle folding technique, and my best hexaflexagon can be seen here.  Given my folding struggles, I decided not to attempt the taco hexaflexagon.