Wiigwaas Enaabajichigaadeg Ji’Agindaasowinikeng: We Are Using Birch Bark to Do Math
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this project, Anishinaabe artists and knowledge carriers worked with non-Indigenous classroom teachers to explore the cultural significance and mathematics of making wiigwaas makakoon (birch bark baskets). The artists spent two weeks in two grade 6 classrooms teaching students the process of basket making. They combined Indigenous pedagogy and intentionally designed inquiry tasks in order to generate mathematically related concepts. To make cultural–mathematical connections, we looked to Battiste’s characteristics of Indigenous pedagogy and explored how the learning that took place was holistic, part of a lifelong process, experiential, rooted in language and culture, spiritual, communal, and an integration of Indigenous and Eurocentric knowledges. Mathematically, students explored measurement with non-standard units, bisected angles without the use of a protractor, and explored the best way to optimize the capacity of their baskets. This work is an example of integrating Indigenous knowledge and heritage into elementary mathematics instruction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".