Week 7 Readings



Reading: Circular Movements of Healing with Maths, Arts and Craft: Reimagining disciplinary transversals for learning

Stop 1

One place where I paused was the way the authors talk about healing not as something dramatic or therapeutic, but as something that happens when learning is allowed to slow down. The repeated emphasis on circularity, returning, lingering, walking, making, touching felt very intentional. Healing here isn’t about correcting misunderstandings or improving performance. It’s about undoing fear, shame, and alienation that many people carry into mathematics, often from very early on.

This landed very personally for me because it mirrors what I’m seeing in households during my fieldwork. Children aren’t anxious about numbers or patterns when they encounter them in daily life. The anxiety enters later, usually through schooling. In homes, learning happens in loops: you watch, you try, you mess up, you try again. No one rushes to name the concept. No one evaluates you mid-process. Reading this article helped me realize that what I’ve been calling “everyday learning” is also a kind of healing practice. It quietly repairs the damage done by fast, outcome-driven systems without ever announcing itself as pedagogy.

Stop 2

Another moment that really stayed with me was the idea of commoning mathematics and treating math as a matter of care rather than a matter of fact. That framing felt powerful and unsettling at the same time. Care implies responsibility, relationship, and attentiveness. It also implies that learning is something shared and held collectively, not extracted from individuals.

This resonates deeply with my thesis. In the households I study, mathematical thinking is always relational. It’s tied to caregiving, livelihood, shared survival, and collective decision-making. Children learn because someone needs help, because something needs to be done, because materials are scarce, or time matters. Math isn’t abstracted away from life; it’s embedded in care. Seeing this articulated so clearly helped me name what often gets lost when institutional systems look at early STEM through individual achievement or readiness. What’s missing isn’t skill. It’s recognition of care as a legitimate epistemic ground.

What this article ultimately helped me see is that the gap I’m studying is not just between home and school, or informal and formal learning. It’s between two different relationships to knowledge. One is linear, fast, extractive, and anxious. The other is circular, slow, embodied, and relational.

I am trying to stay with that second relationship without romanticizing it. This reading gave me language to do that more carefully. It reminded me that healing in education doesn’t always come from adding new tools or interventions. Sometimes it comes from undoing harm, creating time, and trusting that learning already knows how to move if we stop forcing it into straight lines.

Comments

  1. RosmyFebruary 25, 2026 at 4:22 AM

    Hi Sushi,
    I really enjoyed reading your reflection. Your description of healing through the process of slowing down and allowing learning to occur in “loops” really resonated with me. I also had a similar experience while reading the article. Learning is often viewed as a process of moving forward, but the article and your reflection both emphasize the importance of retracing, repeating, and dwelling as ways to reduce fear and pressure.
    Your reflection on household learning was also quite interesting. The point that anxiety is introduced later in life through schooling, rather than in early learning experiences, is definitely true. In most learning experiences, people learn through trial and error, then try again without constant evaluation. This process does seem more gentle and humane.
    Your reflection has also helped me better understand the article, especially the difference between linear and slower learning processes. Thank you for sharing your reflection.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Zhiqian/LeeFebruary 26, 2026 at 12:03 PM

    Thank you Sushi.
    What you’ve written opens such an important question: how do we show our care through mathematics, especially as teachers? I think care becomes visible not through what we deliver, but through the conditions we create.
    We show care when we slow the pace and let students linger with ideas—when learning is allowed to breathe instead of being pushed toward outcomes. We show care by recognizing that many students come to math carrying harm, and that our first task is not instruction but repair. That might look like inviting multiple ways of doing, or allowing students to return to a question without being judged for “not getting it” the first time.
    Care also shows up in how we treat mathematical knowledge itself. When we treat math as relational rather than extractive, we invite students to bring in their home practices, their everyday reasoning, their embodied ways of knowing. We honor the math in cooking, budgeting, arguing, fixing, sharing—not as “informal precursors,” but as full and legitimate mathematical experiences.
    As teachers, our care becomes clearest when we trust students’ ways of knowing, create time instead of taking it away, and allow learning to unfold in circles rather than straight lines.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Math Leaves the Desk: Movement, Meaning, and the Parts That Made Me Pause

Article: Riley, N., Lubans, D., Holmes, K., Hansen, V., Gore, J., & Morgan, P. (2017). Movement-based mathematics: Enjoyment and engagement without compromising learning through the EASY Minds program. EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 13(6), 1653–1673. https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2017.00690a Riley and colleagues’ EASY Minds study is, at its core, a very grounded promise: you can embed physical activity into primary math lessons and get more enjoyment and engagement without sacrificing the quality of learning. Students described the shift from worksheet-heavy routines to lessons where they were outside, moving, collaborating, collecting data, and then actually doing something with that data. Teachers didn’t frame it as cute exercise breaks, but as a different pedagogy: one that made math feel less like rinse and repeat and more like sense-making with your whole body. And honestly, reading it alongside my thesis brain (households, early childhoo...
Read more

Week 8: Math and Poetry

Artist Interview: JoAnne Growney Sarah Glaz This week’s reading genuinely moved me in a way I didn’t expect. I felt a heaviness reading it, partly because I haven’t had much time to read anything outside academic writing lately. The interview felt intimate and alive. It also pulled me back to my own relationship with writing, especially poetry. I grew up in a household with constant argument and loud noise, and poetry became a kind of quiet shelter for me, a place where I could breathe. One thing I kept thinking about is JoAnne’s long gap in writing. She describes not writing poetry for decades and then returning to it later, around the time her children left home. Even though she downplays parental influence at points, I found myself wondering about the role of life circumstances, timing, and emotional bandwidth. She returned to poetry when she had space again. That made me reflect on my own pause. I stopped writing a few years ago too, and it makes me wonder if writing comes in seaso...
Read more

Letter to Nick Sayers by Sushi

I had more than two “stops” while watching this video, so I’m writing this reflection in that same stop-and-start way, following the moments that made me pause and think. I also genuinely enjoyed watching Susan interview Nick. The pacing, the warmth, the way she lets him linger on ideas without rushing to “wrap it up” reminded me of my journalism days, where the best interviews are the ones that feel like listening rather than extracting. Stops that made me pause while watching Nick Sayers: Stop 1: “Math is terrifying” and how early we learn that story One of the first moments that made me stop was how plainly Sayers names fear, not of “math” as a big abstract thing, but of numbers and arithmetic. That detail matters because it pushes back on the myth that math confidence is just a personal trait you either have or don’t. When he points to how people are taught very early that they’re “bad at math,” it landed as less of a confession and more like a diagnosis of a social script. Stop 2:...
Read more