Designing inclusive story-problems for accessible mathematics: the teacher as “designer”

Abstract

One of the most important challenges in (mathematics) education is to consider the individual variability of students in a class group and their different educational needs to foster inclusive, equitable and ambitious education. A crucial aspect is the teachers’ professional development in order to enhance skills in designing accessible and inclusive educational activities. In this perspective, we designed a didactic activity for prospective specialized teachers, as part of the “TFA Sostegno” course (a.y. 2021/2022), at the University of Molise, aimed at developing skills in designing inclusive environments in mathematics. Participants were asked to design “inclusive striped problems”, i.e., story-problems designed in accordance with both Zan’s Context and Question model and the first principle of Universal Design for Learning. In this paper, we intend to analyze participants’ responses to a questionnaire administered at the end of the didactic activity. Our aim is to verify whether the proposed activity was considered by participants to be innovative in mathematics and able to foster accessibility to mathematical content from an inclusive perspective.