“Building a thought-filled curriculum serves the larger agenda of building a more thought-filled world–an interdependent learning community where people continually search for ways to care for one another, learn together, and grow towards greater intelligence.  We must deepen student thinking to hasten the arrival of a world community…” (Arthur L. Costa, “The Thought-Filled Curriculm”, Educational Leadership, 2008)

When you have to worry about covering all of the hundreds of learning objectives prescribed in mandated curricula, how is it possible to change the world?  Especially when there is barely enough time to dedicate to all that you have to teach!  Following your heart and connecting your students to amazing people and stories the world over seems like a luxury, perhaps even an abdication of responsibility.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  My experience using Kiva in my classroom has changed the way I “cover the curriculum”.  It is been an amazing, meaningful context for the learning of significant objectives, particularly in Math.

“To engage students in learning, we must begin by bringing out the imaginative and emotional features of the content, whether in mathematics, science, or any other curriculum area.  Everything in the curriculum is human knowledge–a product of human hopes, fears, and passions.  If we want to make that knowledge engaging to students, we have to show it in the context of the hopes, fears and passions from which is has grown and in which it finds a living meaning.” (Kieran Egan and Gillian Judson, “Of Whales and Wonder”, Educational Leadership 2008)

The “living context” I chose were entrepreneurs from around the developing world, whose business plans and profiles are featured on the microloan website, Kiva.  For a more in depth discussion of what Kiva is and how it impacted my classroom in the first year I used it, see my recent post, “Math Made Compelling: Phase 1 of the Kiva Project“.

When I first had the opportunity to use Kiva in my classroom, I witnessed a perseverance and enthusiasm for understanding and working with numbers that I have never experienced before.  My students were helping people all over the world through Kiva.  They were choosing who to help all by themselves.  The only hitch was that they had to justify their decisions using some pretty complicated numbers.  Life expectancy.  AIDS prevalence rates.  Literacy Rates.  GDP per capita.

Is this really grade 4 and 5 stuff?? I thought it was a bit of a stretch, at first, especially given that most kids don’t learn about these human statistics until middle or high school.  However, the more I studied them, the more I realized that a huge range of numeracy skills are embedded in each of these statistics.

Let’s start with GDP per capita! This statistic is now basic in my class.  Basic in terms of understanding the power that people in various countries have to maintain the health and happiness of themselves and their families, but also basic in terms of number concept.  GDP per capita (which of course is an average annual per person “income”) ranges from hundreds of dollars ($188 for people in Zimbabwe, for example) to tens of thousands of dollars ($40,200 for people living in Canada).  In the grade 4 curriculum, students are expected to demonstrate understanding of numbers up to 10,000 in a variety of ways.  These ways include reading, writing, ordering, comparing, and representing.  It was quite simple for me to have my students find, order, compare, read and write GDP per capita numbers from a range of countries.  The purpose of doing so was explicit and reasonable to my students.  By knowing the GDP per capita of a country and by comparing this amount to what we have in our own country, you have a way of understanding the desperate conditions under which many people in the world live.  This makes it easy to justify helping someone who happens to live in that country.  We mapped, graphed, and explained GDP per capita.  We added up the cost of our Christmas gifts to show how easily we surpassed what many people make in a year.   We solved problems that required us to calculate differences, to determine “per day” or “per month” amounts, and to use words such as double, triple and quadruple.  It was astounding to see how even my most reluctant math students tackled these number activities with gusto.  It was so meaningful and so purposeful.

AIDS and Population Statistics:

I group these two statistical categories together because it is hard to understand the significance of AIDS numbers without knowing the size of the population that they impact.  For example, it is very difficult to tell if 220,000 adults living with AIDS in Swaziland is a particularly significant number until you know that their entire population is only 1,128,814.  My grade 5’s worked with AIDS and population numbers quite extensively.  Many individuals asking for loans through Kiva were impacted by AIDS.  We have made loans to widows and grandmothers looking after their own children and sometimes even the children of deceased loved ones.  My students know to research and write about the impact of AIDS on the country of their loan recipients.  It helps them better understand their needs and feel more confident that their loan is helping the world’s most vulnerable people.

Why just the Grade 5’s? I chose to use AIDS and population statistics as a meaningful context in which to read, write, sort, describe and analyse numbers in the hundreds of thousands and millions, which are significant Grade 5 learning objectives.  My students had very emotional reactions to these numbers.  The nature of the disease and how it is transmitted spurred grand debates about rules–such as cultural rules against sexual activity in Middle Eastern countries–versus education of youth about the risks they face.  Through study of the numbers, they discovered that the latter was not nearly as effective at stopping the spread of AIDS, although many of my students passionately defended the need for people to be able to make decisions for themselves, even though their choices may be poor.  It, indeed, was a very compelling issue.  Admittedly, it dealt with a topic that is not part of the scope and sequence of health education for Grade 5’s.  Nonetheless, I felt quite comfortable leading the discussion and felt that it served to emotionally connect my students to the numbers, something that can be quite difficult to achieve in Mathematics.

Lessons of Literacy Rates:

Literacy rates are not only windows into the differences in basic education levels of people from country to country, but also a measurement of personal empowerment and opportunity.  In Canada, literacy rates are 99% for both males and females.  After examining countries with the lowest GDP per capita, my students noticed two things.  1- That literacy rates were often very low compared to Canada.   For example, in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, the literacy rates are 28%, 37.1% and 42% successively.   2- That female literacy rates were almost always lower than male literacy rates.  Sometimes those differences were very significant.  For example, in Afghanistan, the literacy rate for females is 12.6% compared to 43.1% for males.  In an article entitled, “The Dangers of Teaching Girls in Afghanistan” in The Guardian, Janet Swinney wrote:

“In 2004, The World Bank found that a one year increase in the schooling attainment of all adult females in a country is associated with an increase in GDP per capita for around US$700 per annum.  It also found that education enables women to deveop the skills and the confidence to become active in their communities and to participate in the political process.”

Thus, lower female literacy rates are an incredibly important indicator of the empowerment and opportunities for women.  My students often choose to loan to women for this reason.  Again, knowing literacy rates helps them feel confident that they are empowering and providing opportunity for those who are considered to be less than equal in their own countries.  It is true that literacy rates are expressed as percentages, which are numbers that my students are not supposed to learn until Grade 6.  However, the statistic is far too valuable keep from them simply because is expressed in percent form.  Besides, the more students are exposed to numbers in meaningful contexts, the more fluency they will obtain.  Exposure to these numbers will serve a foundation for deeper study of these numbers in the future, much the same way that exposure to money values in a young life provides a foundation for understanding decimals and decimal fractions.

Life Expectancy:  Pulling It All Together…

Life Expectancy is the final statistic that I exposed my students to this year.  I chose to leave it until the end, not because it is a complicated statistic to understand, but because it can possibly be explained through careful analysis of GDP per capita, AIDS numbers and Literacy Rates.  At the most basic level, it is evidence for how well people are able to meet their basic needs…the ones that translate into longer, healthier lives.  At a more complex level, it is the result of a complicated web of factors.  My grade 5’s embarked in an analysis of Life Expectancy data a couple of months ago.  The looked for correlations not only with AIDS, literacy and GDP per capita, but also with war and risk of infectious diseases.  There were no easy answers, although there were lots of questions and debate (all carried out on a class discussion board).  It was an engaging and eye-opening activity, not just for the kids, but for me as well.

This year, my eyes were fully open to the opportunities for not only emotionally engaging my students in the “cold” world of mathematics, but for effectively covering learning objectives as well.  Kiva was the turning point for me, and it has truly developed into a Renaissance in my classroom.  I now find myself actively seeking engaging, relevant and emotional contexts for all of my teaching (and learning) in Math.  It is hard for me to accept anything else when I have witnessed first hand, just how powerful and effective a meaningful context can be.  I will continue to chronicle these contexts as time goes on.  Believe me…once you give them a go, you’ll never turn back!

Jen