Seen With Other Eyes: A Service Learning Project for High School Mathematicians Working with Visually Impaired Learners

Abstract

Seen With Other Eyes (SWOE) is a community involvement project that focuses on mathematics education for the visually impaired. In this essay I describe this project, which I developed together with my students at Robert College, a private high school in Turkey, and share some of our story. In the past few years, our work was welcomed by the global mathematics education community, as a testimony to the power of social media to connect like-minded educators with one another. Can you imagine what would happen to: Student motivation Understanding how to apply concepts in geometry (or any course), Sense of global value and global voice Teamwork Value of creating a lasting legacy Grit and focus if you presented your students with a complex real world problem to solve? Introducing problem solving with purpose can create a much more powerful and highly successful learning environment than I ever imagined. As a traditional teacher in a highly competitive school who loves mathematics