| ORILLAS is a multilingual networking project for educators
concerned with language, culture, and equity. The network's name, "De Orilla
a Orilla" (Spanish for "From Shore to Shore") was chosen to reflect the
reality of teacher collaborations that span oceans and continents.
During the last three schools years, ORILLAS has co-sponsored (together with the PSR*TEC and I*EARN-Orillas) an international networking project called, "Connecting Mathematics to Our Lives." Students were invited a) to explore how math is used in their families and communities, and b) to use math skills (ranging from simple computation, to averages, percents, graphing, and statistics) to investigate community or social concerns and to take action to promote greater equity in the world around them. The project has been enthusiastically received. More than 56 classes from 14 countries participated during the 1999-2000 school year, exchanging ideas on-line in English and Spanish. This book contains examples which represent the many projects that teachers and students engaged in. We hope you enjoy it and gain new ideas for linking math to the lives of the students in your classroom. Global learning network projects help children to make real connections in the real world while learning academic content. The basic principle of global learning networks is to connect classrooms in different parts of the world to work on common projects. In ORILLAS/PSR*TEC/I*EARN co-sponsored projects, this principle is taken further -- participants explore ways in which these partnerships can promote dynamic and relevant investigation and be integrated into the curriculum within a framework of collaborative and critical inquiry and purposeful social action. (See the graphic representation on the next page.) In the Connecting Math to Our Lives Project, teachers and students have identified activities that take students beyond the traditional descriptive activities found so often in text books to deeper levels of comprehension: * to critical inquiry and analysis in which students engage in the more abstract process of critically analyzing the issues or problems that have been raised * to creative social action in which students discuss and explore ways in which social realities might be transformed through various forms of democratic participation and social justice. 1) a series of on-line discussions with bilingual math educators on such topics as math curriculum standards and the use of variables to analyze the dynamics of the larger society.
Kristin Brown, ORILLAS, U.S.
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