When the facilitator of a family math group adopts an exploratory and holistic approach to math, what changes occur in parents’ attitudes to math and to helping their children with math learning? What are the effects of an egalitarian facilitation style on parents’ attitudes to participation in family math activities?
I proposed to explore the questions by first preparing a draft manual for parents or people acting in loco parentis, which would include activities for parents to do with their children, from infants to age 14, and then inviting parents to come to a series of group sessions where they would explore the materials in the group. I would ask participants to try them out with their children, then come back and report on their experience so the activities could be modified, adopted or deleted from the draft manual. I thought that asking them to evaluate and test the manual would reduce the power differential between us by focusing attention on the relative merits of the materials themselves rather than on the individual participant’s level of math skill, and that participants’ input would produce a stronger, more useful manual. I planned to do preliminary interviews and a pre-test of math skills before the group sessions started, and to do a final interview and a post test after the groups had finished. I planned to meet with each group twice a week for 11 weeks.
Although my question did not ask specifically about Aboriginal parents, I planned from the beginning to include many Aboriginal parents in the study, in groups that were both mixed race and all Aboriginal, so that the materials developed in the group would be inclusive of and attractive to Aboriginal users.
I put my proposal to the VIU Committee for Research Involving Human Subjects in May, 2007. The committee had a few questions in response to my initial proposal, mainly concerned with emotional issues that might be raised by participation. To answer these concerns, I arranged to have a counsellor available to participants, either from the Student Services Department at VIU or from the agencies where groups were scheduled to be held.
All participants signed a consent form (Appendix A), whose salient feature is the plain language it is written in. Since I was planning to recruit participants who might well have difficulty with reading and writing as well as math, it was important the consent form be easy to read. I read over the form with each participant in a private interview, and gave a copy to each one.
I assured participants that I would not use their names in the body of the report, and further, that comments they made, and test results, would not be identifiable as theirs. I asked if they would like to have their names listed in the acknowledgments section of the manual, and participants gave me the wording of the name they wanted to appear, if any. Several chose to remain anonymous, and the rest chose to use their first names only, or initials only, or pseudonyms, or their full real names.