Week 8 - Critical Reflection - Mathematics & fibre arts, fashion arts and culinary arts

 

A section of a quilt my mom made for me.
(I bought the fabric in Hawaii for her,
she re-gifted it back to me like this.)
I have more terminology to describe
what I see in quilts after watching
the presentation by de Vries.

   I got most involved with the activity this week and found the reading and viewing a little harder to engage with, which I am disappointed in because this week connects to artistic endeavours I regularly undertake. I can explain some of it with mental exhaustion right out of the gate on Monday with several during the day and after school meetings and it didn’t let up all week. I think that is why the paper folding got done – there was mental energy involved but I could convince myself to engage with it. “At least go try to fold some paper before bed, then you have done something!”  The exhaustion seems to have interfered with “stops” and rather, I found myself engaging then processing and adding layers to the processing as I went through more materials. In the end, I have, rather than stops, some overall thoughts, a few of which I will put down here and hope the others come out in responses to others.

Concrete-abstract support system

A section of a quilt my mom made for me

    In this week’s introduction, Susan quickly reminded us of our discussions about the binary of concrete and abstract before moving onto a discussion about binary based on gender and social class. However, the concrete-abstract binary came to mind in my reflection on the activity, reading, and viewing. Or rather, I noticed how this binary was really challenged in the artistic crafts we looked at. In the reading I did by sarah-marie belcastro, she mentioned how she designs a pattern for her mathematical objects before starting her knitting because she does not want to “lose the work” by relying on a not-so-reliable memory. I thought the blurring of the binary was apparent in this case; she needs a concrete pattern to record her thinking in order to create a concrete object. Any abstract manipulation in her head (which I mused earlier in the course can be argued to be concrete) is tested and confirmed through the concrete. I watched the Gerda de Vries Quilts as Mathematical Objects presentation (after falling dead-asleep sitting up during a viewing of the one on shibori dyeing!) and noticed a concrete-abstract support system in play. De Vries talked about her own quilts and I felt like there was a lot of imagination through a “what would happen if…” kind of thinking and then that got tested with the concrete material of fabric pieces. I have only a little experience with quilting but do enjoy playing around with it when I have time (more often when I visit my mom who is a quilter). I know I play with blocks in my head sometimes before I move them around to see if what I imagine will actually work. I could also feel the abstract-concrete playing together when I folded paper; sometimes I would stop and picture how the rest of a row would have to be pushed and pulled and prodded and what it would look like before I made the paper move. I can tie this back to Susan’s introduction and our discussions in the dance week with the idea of the third space where abstract and concrete work in support of each other in a way that it is hard to extricate one from the other.

Quilt in progress
These 'stars' were not my original design but
when I did some imagining (abstract)
and playing (concrete) these stars appeared.

I also imagine and play with how the units can
come together. I'm trying to decide if I separate
each unit with a strip of fabric or keep
them together like in the first picture.

How do you see a concrete-abstract support system at play in your classroom or your life?

Gender binary and the mathematics in handicrafts and culinary arts

I found myself considering the gender and social class hierarchies that are thought of in binary terms and what shifts may or may not have happened to date. I am still working this out and welcome engagement and debate. The cynic in me wonders if the shift to valuing the inherent mathematical activity in handicrafts is because of men taking them up and men examining them for mathematics. I can already challenge that idea by noting that I witnesses through reading and viewing, two women, belcastro and de Vries, examining the mathematics in knitting and quilting. However, I can find evidence of the work of men in handicrafts traditionally done by women being held up higher or given more accolades. Sometimes it is very subtle. For example, de Vries showed a quilt in her presentation and referred to the quilter as “he.” In her next sentence, she specifically said, “this quilter is male” after using “he” again and there was just enough inflection in her voice that held the work up. The accolades are not just in handicrafts. I think of the food industry, too, where awards seem to favour male chefs and restauranteurs (and the industry as a whole is dominated by men). According to an article in the Jakarata Post, only 2.7% of Michelin starred restaurants are run by women. When I went looking for artists working with paper after engaging with the paper folding, I looked at male artists that had been suggested by Peter Beck, 4 out of the 5 artists he referenced being male. I realize I am veering away from the mathematics connections here, but can bring us back to my earlier point in wondering if the mathematics in traditionally female-endeavours is valued because of male participation.

From the Jakarta Post 

How might we engage in conversations about social justice related to gender binaries through engagement in fibre arts, culinary arts, and fashion arts in our mathematics classrooms?

Bringing fibre arts, fashion arts, and culinary arts to our classrooms

While I very much value the place of these arts in a mathematics classroom, and have done so in bringing cardboard loom weaving to a patterns exploration (I’d show you a picture but I didn’t realize Showbie dumps classes after 5 years so I have lost some student work pictures), I know the struggle to make students, families, and colleagues understand how it is mathematics. Susan talks about a “shift in attitude” and I get that – but it is sometimes hard to get that shift in others. I have a number of teachers piloting MathUP, an online teacher resource by Marian Small, in their classrooms. One teacher told me how she was released for remedy the other day and had a TTOC in her classroom. She left a MathUP lesson for the TTOC, who is a trained secondary math teacher, and got to chat with her after school. The teacher reported to me that just the idea of playing with mathematics through manipulatives stretched this secondary trained TTOC. Not all colleagues have the flexible thinking that members of this cohort do. I could definitely offer workshops where teachers experience these arts and making mathematical connections first hand, but who is going to sign up for the workshops? The people who like to push their thinking and explore different places where math lives. Then there are the parents and students, too.  When I did the weaving, I first started the students off on it and then it became something they needed to schedule themselves (I had the students making their own afternoon schedules – things they must do and other things they could do and it had to be a mix to get everything accomplished over time). There was a group of, for lack of better term, good students that dismissed the weaving product as unimportant. Only when I really pushed them to explain how they were going to demonstrate their understanding of increasing and decreasing patterns without having completed the project, did they start the buy-in (I actually would have welcomed an idea for an alternate project but they didn’t offer one). In no way am I using this challenge of buy-in or inability to shift thinking as a way out of incorporating these arts into mathematics classrooms, but only recognizing the effort it can take to convince/educate others into the value of and place for these arts.

Do you think I am being overly cynical about colleagues, parents, and students? Is there more potential for shift than I am giving these stakeholders credit for?

My knitting of a mathematical object

At first I almost dismissed belcastro’s knitting of mathematical objects as something I would never do. Then I realized, I have knit a mathematical object.  Here is a toy cat I made for a little girl who calls me “Auntie” when she turned 5:

Kitlyn - I see mathematical objects in her body parts

The cat’s name is Kitlyn. I reflected that in knitting the head, it was making a spherical object (I won’t quite call it a sphere). It was challenging but I remember that it really appealed to my mathematical brain. I think making the arms from an almost flat piece to one that decreases at the end (hands) to force a cylindrical shape was a kind of mathematical object creation, too.