Several agencies in the community offered me free space for the group sessions, and others helped me recruit participants. With all this community support and enthusiasm, I was surprised at how difficult it was to recruit participants. Instead of the 60 I had hoped for (in 6 different groups), I ended up with only 29 participants in 3 groups. Even though I was discouraged about not being able to recruit as many parents of the kind I was looking for (mainly First Nations, mainly people who had not done well at school math) I resisted the temptation to start recruiting others who didn’t meet my criteria. I thought of putting an ad in the paper, for example, or sending an invitation to the network of home-schooling parents in the area, or recruiting the friends and families of colleagues at the Cowichan campus, but decided against all these. While I thought such strategies might have produced more participants, I expected they would be people who were accustomed to respond to ads and stories in the newspaper—people with higher levels of education who were used to signing up for courses advertised in that way. I knew that the more I was successful at recruiting white participants, and those of all races with higher levels of education, the more difficult I would make it for the parents I was most interested in to thrive and take part in the group sessions.
As I began to interview the people who were willing to come in to see me, I began to
get a sense that most of them loved math in their school years, even those who described
the activities they had loved in such a way that I could see they had been
working at a very early elementary level, no matter what their age or grade at school
leaving. (For example, someone said they loved “pluses and minuses.”) What was
the secret of my failure to attract parents who hated and feared math? At the final
interview, many participants expressed surprise at how much fun the activities
were, having expected the kind of activities they were familiar with in school. One
said, “I expected it to be a lot of work—more work than fun,
” and another commented,
“I expected more the math sheets and math book. It turned out to be fun.
”
The fact that participants were expecting traditional school math activities, in spite
of my posters, talk and demonstrations during the recruitment phase, may explain
why so few people who hate/fear math were willing to sign up for the project.
People who don’t like math may simply be unable to believe that spending time on
math activities could be enjoyable in any way. When I posed this question to the
group of participants who met at the Reading and Writing Centre, one of them confirmed
my suspicions by saying, “Most people don’t realize it will just be fun activities,
not more worksheets or being pressured into doing something you don’t want
to do.
” Other group members agreed.
I had been feeling frustrated myself at my inability to recruit more participants. As I sensed that I was mainly getting people with a positive attitude to math, in spite of my friendly outreach, my demonstrations of the types of activities I planned for the math group, the offered honorarium and the support from other professionals who had contact with potential participants, I wondered what more I could do to attract people who don’t like math to a math group!