Week 3 – Sustainable Mathematics in and with the Living World

Introduction: Learning Mathematics Outdoors and with the Land

Most mathematics learning still happens indoors, inside classrooms shaped by desks, schedules, and expectations that quietly influence how we think about knowledge. This week’s focus invites us to pause and ask a different question: What happens when mathematics learning moves outdoors and happens in relationship with the living world? The introduction for this week challenges the idea of the mathematics classroom as a static, silent space. Instead, it invites learning that is embodied, sensory, and relational, learning that happens on and with the Land. Outdoor spaces like gardens, fields, forests, riverbanks, or schoolyards are not just alternate locations for lessons. They can act as co-teachers. The living world responds, changes, resists control, and invites attention in ways that cannot be fully planned or contained. This is not a call to abandon indoor learning, notation, or structure. Rather, it is about balance. When mathematics is taught only through symbols on paper, it can drift away from meaning. Learning outdoors can help reconnect mathematical thinking to lived experience. It can support curiosity, lower anxiety, and invite deeper noticing, especially when learning is designed to honour place rather than treat it as a backdrop.

Reading Reflections: The Grid, Balance, and Living Beside Structure

This week’s readings also helped me reflect on the “grid” of schooling. The grid shows up everywhere: in timetables, curriculum documents, assessment tools, classroom layouts, and even in how we organize our thinking. The grid can feel comforting. It helps manage the complexity of teaching and learning. But it also limits what is possible. What resonated with me was the idea that we don’t need to fully escape the grid to teach differently. Instead, we can learn to live beside it. Sometimes we work within it. Sometimes we loosen it. Sometimes we resist it. This way of thinking feels more honest than pretending we can step completely outside systems that shape us.

Connections to Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Learning mathematics in and with the living world also connects strongly to Indigenous ways of knowing. It brings attention to relationship, story, responsibility, and reciprocity. In this framing, mathematics becomes a way of relating to the world, not just measuring or controlling it. That feels especially important in a time of ecological crisis, when education has a role to play in how young people learn to care for the world they are part of. The idea of “dancing teachers into being with a garden” stayed with me. It offers a different image of teaching, one that values listening, noticing, movement, and even stillness. Teaching does not always have to mean talking, directing, or managing. Sometimes it can mean making space for learning to emerge through experience. This week reminded me that mathematics does not have to be separate from culture, story, or Land. When learning happens in relationship, mathematics can carry meaning that lasts far beyond the classroom.

Stop One: Sweetgrass, Story, and Carrying Knowledge Forward.

My thinking begins with sweetgrass and the stories it carries. One place this begins for me is the children’s book The First Blade of Sweetgrass by Suzanne Greenlaw and Gabriel Frey, illustrated by Nancy Baker. This story offers an accessible way to understand the history and importance of sweetgrass, not just as a plant, but as a living teacher and relative. Alongside this, I find myself drawn to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I have not read it yet, but I am aware of its focus on relationships between people, plants, and responsibility to the Land, and it feels like a book I am ready to spend time with. Together, these texts will help me learn more about sweetgrass as something living and relational, rather than something to be studied at a distance. Sweetgrass also connects closely to my own family story. I carry memories of my dad talking about the smell of sweetgrass while processing hay to feed animals on the ranch where I grew up. That land has been in our family for seven generations. It will remain in our family, as it is being willed to my grandchildren with clear expectations around care and responsibility. I am the grandma now, and that matters. I didn’t grow up with these teachings. My grandparents couldn’t talk openly about who they were. Their generation had to hide their identity, and that silence carried into my dad’s generation and then into mine. I have stopped it there. I will make no apologies and no concealment of my culture anymore. I see it as my responsibility to make sure the next generation grows up knowing who they are, where they come from, and how knowledge lives in relationship with the Land. When I think about sweetgrass this way, mathematics is already present—in cycles, in continuity across generations, and in systems of care and stewardship.

children’s book The First Blade of Sweetgrass by Suzanne Greenlaw and Gabriel Frey, illustrated by Nancy Baker

Stop Two: Rewilding Schooling Through Sweetgrass and the Senses.

I love the idea of rewilding schooling, and this week helped me imagine what that could look like more clearly. When I think about sweetgrass, I imagine learning that brings many senses together. I picture being out in the fields with students, smelling the sweetgrass, feeling it in our hands as we gather it, noticing the texture of the blades as we prepare them for braiding. There is movement in this work, and patience, and attention. There would be conversation too. Stories shared between students and teacher. Questions that arise naturally. And there would be sound, the wind moving through the grass, the quiet rhythm of hands working, the calls of birds or other creatures nearby. Learning would not be silent, but it also wouldn’t be rushed. Thinking about this makes me realize that I could create learning experiences that hold all of these senses together. I just haven’t fully done that yet. The pull of schedules, curriculum pacing, and classroom expectations is strong. For me, rewilding schooling doesn’t mean removing structure altogether. It means loosening it enough to make space for learning like this to happen. Sweetgrass feels like an invitation to slow down, to notice, and to learn with the Land rather than simply about it.

Stop Three: Between Two Trees

I once saw a short video showing a family weaving between two trees. I wasn’t able to track down the original video, but later found an image that helped me return to the idea: backstrap weaving anchored to living trees. That image stayed with me. The trees are part of the learning system. The body becomes part of the loom. The environment matters. Weaving in this way challenges the idea that learning must be framed by classroom walls or fixed structures. Mathematics shows up here through pattern, tension, repetition, and direction, but it does so in a way that is alive and responsive.

https://backstrapweaving.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/backstrap-weaving-where-the-yarn-grows-on-trees/

Stop Four: Weaving, the Métis Sash, and Passing Stories Forward

I have done this type of weaving with students. My students created friendship bracelets while learning about the Red River Métis sash. The colours carry meaning connected to community. The patterns range from simple to complex and include directionality that tells stories. For many students, especially Métis students—this work was about more than art or mathematics. It was about connection. These are stories that have been interrupted by disconnection from culture, shaped by political pressures and the need to survive. That loss matters. It also makes the work of returning to these stories even more important for future generations.

Example of weaving with my students 

Image of a loom, that was used in a course I took. 

Here we are making the Arrowhead Metis Sash

Arrowhead Sash Pattern

My Final Reflection: Why This Matters

This week invited me to rethink mathematics as something that can be learned in relationship with the living world. Outdoor learning, Indigenous perspectives, and embodied experiences offer ways to loosen the grid of schooling and make space for learning rooted in place, story, and responsibility. Rather than trying to escape structure, I am learning to live beside it, creating room for mathematics that is meaningful, relational, and alive.