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Geography and Art

When choosing the Social Studies elective I did not realise that art would ever be linked to geography. Geography is about exploring the world around us (Tanner, 2013, pp. 128) and this world can be explored through art. There are several different circumstances where people have expressed how they feel about something through art.

Craftivism is a way in which people express how they feel about something through art. This can be seen as a gentle protest. These people use art to challenge injustice in the world. They use craft and art to express their opinions and encourage conversations to open. Craftivist Collective are a group of people who do exactly this. They use craft to “help themselves and encourage others to have a positive change in the world.” (Corbett, nd). This group do things like send embroidered letters to MPs about issues they they have; make hearts to wear on your sleeve to promote climate change and create banners with material to promote injustices in the world. Now you may ask yourself ‘What is the advantage of doing this over a regular protest or banner?’ The answer is simple, would you walk past a pretty eye-catching cross-stitched banner in the street? Probably not! If something is different then you are more likely to stop, have a quick glance at it and that is what this group needs. By making people stop and look, this means more people see it and speak about it. You are far more likely to remember an embroidered banner or someone wearing a heart on their sleeve than a normal banner.

How does this link to social studies and teaching? This group promote issues that we would normally teach about and discuss in our social studies lessons. Often, at some point in a year of school a social studies lesson will be based around discussing an issue in the news or something that is going on around us, for example, climate change. This sort of issue relates to geography. Instead of the children creating a poster, banner etc they could create something with cross-stitching or embroidery. Anna had us do this in our lecture and as well as make me aware of an issue and want to do something about it, it was fun!

This is a banner that the Craftivist Collective created!

Artists have used art to express themselves on other matters that relate to Social Studies as well. In several art museums throughout the world artists have used their art to express topics that are relevant in social studies. There are several different artists pieces in art museums throughout the world that convey different Social Studies matter or issues. These are great for children to see and discuss as they let children see how Art and Social Studies can be linked together effectively and easily. For children to discuss these different art pieces and what they mean not only develops their discussion skills but also their enquiry and interpretation skills.

References

Corbett, S. (n.d.). Our Story. [online] Craftivist Collective. Available at: https://craftivist-collective.com/our-story/ [Accessed 9 Nov. 2017].

Tanner, J. (2013) ‘Geography and the Creative Arts’, in Scoffham, S. (ed.) Teaching Geography Creatively. London: Taylor and Francis, pp 128-142.

My Understanding of PUFM

Basic Ideas

Ma (2010, p.122) describes this as ” Teachers with PUFM display mathematical attitudes and are particularly aware of the “simple but powerful basic concepts and principles of mathematics” (e.g. the idea of an equation). They tend to revisit and reinforce these basic ideas. By focusing on these basic ideas, students are not merely encouraged to approach problems, but are guided to conduct real mathematical activity.”

The basic ideas of mathematics are really important as children need these basic ideas to be able to continue to more complex areas. The basic ideas are similar to the foundations a building. If these basic ideas are not taught correctly to children or some areas are missed out that will make it more difficult for children to learn the more difficult areas of mathematics that are built on top of these basic ideas. These basic ideas need to be reinforced so that children have a sound understanding of them. For example, children need to learn addiction and subtraction before they can move on to more complicated areas like money and time.

Connectedness

“A teacher with PUFM has a general intention to make connections among mathematical concepts and procedures, from simple and superficial connections between individual pieces of knowledge to complicated and underlying connections among different mathematical operations and subdomains. When reflected in teaching, this intention will prevent students’ learning from the being fragmented. Instead of learning isolated topics, students will learn a unified body of knowledge.” (Liping Ma 2010, p.122)

Connectedness is a mathematical concepts that means math is connected to other subjects. I have realised through this module how important this principle is as there is math in everything.
In order for teachers to achieve connectedness they need to teach mathematics beside the areas that it can relate to and not as a single subject. Since math is laced through nearly everything that we do, that is how it needs to be taught. For children to have a thorough understanding on mathematics it is best to teach it alongside the other subjects that it is connected to.
A teacher could teach a music lesson and whilst doing different values of musical notes could do some work on counting and addiction. Another example would be a baking lesson, weight and measurement could be taught while measuring the ingredients. This gives the children some context to their lessons rather than just weighing random items that they do not care much about.

Multiple Perspectives

Liping Ma (2010) discribes multiple perspectives as “Those who have achieved PUFM appreciate different facets of an idea and various approaches to a solution as well as their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, they are able to provide mathematical explanations of these various facets and approaches. In this way, teachers can lead their students to a flexible understanding of the discipline.”

Multiple perspectives means that children need to have several ways to get to the answering not just one. This is useful for children as not everybody’s brains work in the same way. This means that if a child does not understand the first way that a new mathematical area is taught then the second or third way might make more sense. By multiple perspectives being provided in the classroom, it makes mathematics less restrictive and easier to understand.

Longitudinal Coherence

Lastly, Ma (2010, p.122) states that longitudinal coherence is needed to have a profound understanding of mathematics.
Ma describes this as “Teachers with PUFM are not limited to the knowledge that should be taught in a certain grade, rather they have achieved a fundamental understanding of the whole elementary mathematics curriculum. With PUFM, teachers are ready at any time to exploit an opportunity to review crucial concepts that students have studied previously. They also know what students are going to learn later, and take opportunities to lay the proper foundation for it.”

This concept is the one I found most difficult to understand. However, it is still important but just takes a little longer to understand. This principle says that what a child learns should not be limited because of their age and year that they are in. Ma says that a teacher should be able to teach any mathematics to suit the level of his/her children. I think that this is vitally important for in the classroom as children should not be limited just because they are a certain age. If a child understands all of the areas that they “should” know in their year then why should they not be moved on to the next area even though it is normally done in the next year up. This means that teachers need to be prepared to teach children of all levels.

References

Liping (2010) Knowing and teaching elementary mathematics: Teachers’ understanding of fundamental mathematics in china and the United States. 2nd edn. New York: Taylor & Francis.