Our Curricular Vision:
To Democratize Access to the Big Ideas of Mathematics
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| With many others, we see a strong need for more longitudinal coherence in the school mathematics curriculum with a stronger focus on the big mathematical ideas—a move from a layer-cake structure that filters all-too-many students out of mathematics to a strands structure that allows ALL students, beginning in the early grades, to learn the mathematics of uncertainty, of space and dimension, and especially, the mathematics of change and variation. While achieving a strands organization requires a deep analysis of content, we are coming to understand how a newly efficient reorganization may be possible that transforms and contextualizes many of the important ideas and processes that already appear in the curriculum. For example, the math of change and variation can contextualize intuitively based learning of multiplication, area, rate, ratio, similarity, signed and rational number, among many other possibilities. At the same time, it provides ways to base this learning in rich physical, kinesthetic, and qualitative experiences. Throughout we assume an active, student-centered pedagogy that taps into students’ physical experience and their visual and linguistic competence. This is reflected in the activities that accompany the software. |
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