Memeingful Work

Good afternoon All. Hope all is well and you are having a wonderful start to the semester. My name is Dr. Greg Benoit, a Math Ed faculty member at Boston University. Currently our research team, Math Meme Team has a  project that centers popular culture/social media and students’ mathematical identities (Abstract Below). As such we've created a website (https://mathmemeteam.com/ ) and wanted to leverage the New England Community for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching to engage in some research activities that our undergraduate research assistant has helped designed  (https://mathmemeteam.com/research-activities/ ).  These also make for great conversations in your courses :-) 

I'm also attaching our most recent research article that provides further context (see link below). If you are interested in learning more, please do not hesitate to email .

Abstract to provide more context. One of the grand challenges mathematics education will face is trying to change the public’s (including their K-12 students) perception about mathematics, who can do good in it and mathematics’ role in society (Stephan et al., 2015). We believe social media can offer snapshots of societal perception of mathematics, particularly in math internet memes, and help us better address this challenge. So in design a website to begin to help us capture the public perception (which melody attached). This research is part of a larger design-based research project focused on creating critical conversations about mathematics and strengthening users critical mathematics media literacy by making meaning of the dominant and oppositional representations of mathematics. 

We look forward to any correspondence.