Mexican American Women Talking About Graphs: A Focus on Their Lived Experiences

We present the work with a group of Mexican American women who participated in a larger project aimed at developing a two-way dialogue about mathematics between parents and teachers. The basis of our study is the concept of funds of knowledge, which recognizes the richness of adult learners’ lived experiences. Funds of knowledge are defined as the resources and bodies of knowledge contained in a household. We focused on a task that required the participants (mothers) to create a story based on a given graph. Although the task was a somewhat typical school task (interpreting a graph), our focus was not on how the participants solved a school task but on how they transformed the task to make it fit their interests while still engaging in mathematical discourse. Findings indicate that all the mothers personalized their stories by relating it to their day-to-day lives. The open-endedness of the task allowed the mothers to take different routes on their interpretations of their graphs and to use their daily experiences as a point of reference. The mothers built together their knowledge about interpreting a graph and gave evidence of mathematical understanding.