The Biographies Project - Coauthor Enid Figueroa

Opportunities for Math and Change in the School Library

Chapter 8

Literacy, Technology and Diversity
Cummins, Brown, and Sayers, (2007)

“Connecting Math to our lives was organized by a Gobal Learning Network Project De Orilla a Orilla and the Pacific Southwest Regional Technology in Education Consortium in collaboration with International Education and Resource Network (iearn)” p. 183, Cummins, Brown, and Sayers.

Bob Peterson, a fifth grade teacher and Rethinking Schools editor was the inspiration for the biographic activity described in the CMTOL project.

An easy-to-use data collection form was used by students in their schools. The teacher set up links with other school classes as an audience for their writing and to obtain a broader data base.

Third, family members accompanied students while they obtained information from the San Francisco Public Library. Parents acted as facilitators.

Finally, the results were shared globally inspiring others nationally and world wide.

I was surprised to find out that this project was compiled by grades 1, 2, and 3 in schools that bilingual.

Through explicit teaching and collaboration at each step along the way the teachers helped these children decode what they needed to find in the big nondecodable biography texts in the school and city libraries. First of all they practiced by writing their own friend’s biographies. Then they wrote biographies of children in the other school. After they understood this process, they were able to collect the data. Information gathered was about race, occupation, class, disability, gender, and dead or alive from the biography text. They could use graphs, percentages, or fractions to describe the collection. They gathered all the information pictorially on a wall chart so that even the first grade children could understand it. Then eventually both schools shared their data on the Internet with each other. Finally after both schools had collected information from their own school libraries, they branched out to visit the city public libraries. Last of all they all met as a huge group and visited one city library together with their parents assisting.

After all this information was collected and recorded they shared it with the Global community. Finally to obtain change, the students wrote a letter to the libraries recommending the type of books that they felt should be obtained to make it a fair coverage including more biographies on women and people of other races.

All the way through the project students used an online date base to record their information, E-mail to coordinate activities, a mailing list, and Web based forum, word processing and graphing software. They covered a number of curriculum areas and went way beyond that.

These student were empowered to make changes for the good in their community and to promote fairness with the knowledge that they obtained from the data gathering.