Moving toward shared realities through empathy in mathematical modeling: An ecological systems theory approach

Abstract

The mathematics education community has routinely called for mathematics tasks to be connected to the real world. However, accomplishing this in ways that are relevant to students’ lived experiences can be challenging. Meanwhile, mathematical modeling has gained traction as a way for students to learn mathematics through real‐world connections. In an open problem to the mathematics education community, this paper explores connections between the mathematical modeling and the nature of what is considered relevant to students. The role of empathy is discussed as a proposed component for consideration within mathematical modeling so that students can further relate to real‐world contexts as examined through the lens of Ecological Systems Theory. This is contextualized through a classroom‐tested example entitled “Tiny Homes as a Solution to Homelessness” followed by implications and conclusions as they relate to mathematics education.

Constructing radical community: an ecological model for shifting from an EdD to a We-dD in online doctoral programs

“…Based on these responses, the researchers then created an online diagram, adapted from Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of child development (1977, 1979), placing the online learner rather than the child (as Bronfenbrenner does in his original model) at the center of the ecology and inviting students to populate the rest. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, as described above, although originally developed to understand how children grow and develop, has been widely adapted to understand other processes such as how families of research methods influence one another (Onwuegbuzie et al, 2013 ), community partnerships (Leonard, 2011 ), immigrant experiences (Paat, 2013 ), and mathematical modeling (Edelen et al, 2020 ) to name but a few. In particular, the framework emphasizes how individuals comprise much more than themselves and represent an amalgamation of how individual dispositions interact with many layers of social and cultural phenomena and structures.…”

The Bronfenbrenner primer: A guide to develecology, Lawrence G.SheltonNew York, NY: Routledge, 2019, pp. 164, $27.96 (paperback)

“…Since introducing the ecological model of human development, researchers and practitioners have applied Bronfenbrenner's ecological concepts in various contexts. Most recently, researchers have used Bronfenbrenner's theory as a guiding framework to examine areas of study as diverse as the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals in Ghana (Adu & Oudshoorn, 2020), Black/White disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States (Noursi et al, 2021), and teaching students mathematics (Edelen et al, 2020).…”

Predicting the Learning Avoidance Motivation, Learning Commitment, and Silent Classroom Behavior of Chinese Vocational College Students Caused by Short Video Addiction

“…Furthermore, the EST provides guidelines to higher education researchers and practitioners for how they can examine student development within their educational ecosystems [ 10 ]. The EST posits that each system has different norms, rules, and procedures that have direct relationships defined as the face-to-face events that students collect as experience, and these also affect how students understand the surrounding world [ 11 ]. The EST helps to explain students’ experience of using short videos and their own rules of learning, and so was adopted as the theoretical basis of this study.…”