OSU Digital Mathematics Storytelling

What is Digital Mathematics Storytelling?

While children in urban emergent communities live mathematically rich lives, they are provided few opportunities to connect their out-of-school mathematical knowledge to in-school mathematics tasks that are unproportionally based on non-culturally relevant examples, such as measuring ingredients for chocolate chip cookies. Because of this disconnect, fractions and other rational numbers effectively become gatekeepers, pushing 3rd-grade children in urban emergent communities out of a pathway to develop proportional reasoning and algebraic thinking knowledge. This disconnect violently severs opportunities for children in urban emergent communities to develop their own mathematics narratives in their own voices and languages, thereby pushing them away from a future STEM-related career. This project explores the use of Digital Storytelling for children in urban emergent communities to document, share, and showcase the rich mathematical knowledge that exists in their own communities. Not only will this project use current technology to engage children in creating their own mathematics narratives, it will develop a repository of authentic digital mathematics stories that will be available for all teachers and families to disrupt the canon of mathematics examples centered on white, middle-class norms.