Teachers Posing Model-Eliciting Activities to Connect Socially-Relevant Perspective with Closely Connected Mathematical Ideas

In this chapter, we describe how a group of preservice and practicing teachers learned about and posed new model-eliciting activities (MEAs), with the goal of making mathematical ideas accessible and relevant to their students. In the context of an eight-week modelling course, we provided teachers with guiding prompts to pose MEAs around mathematical structures and concepts similar to those featured in MEAs they had previously experienced as learners. When posing MEAs in this setting, teachers identified multiple ways to engage their students—connections that highlighted both mathematical features and social relevance. In particular, the teachers expressed the desire for their students to see how math could be used for social justice and to consider the role that mathematics plays in such events. These findings suggest that in problem posing, MEAs may provide teachers a conceptual lens to help them construct mathematically rich situations that matter to students’ lives, elicit the mathematization of the real-world, and support students’ understanding of societal issues.