This presentation will center around an evolving task that I have been using with my third year pre-service teachers over the past 6 years. What began as an activity to engage students who had rarely, if ever, used manipulative materials in their mathematics learning, has quickly and dramatically grown into a large undertaking of research, growth in combinatorics and probabilistic thinking, and an effective tool for engaging with my pre-service teachers. This task has given the students an experience of developing and analyzing mathematical thinking within a learning setting and has resulted in increased confidence while we are all gaining deeper understanding, and some confusion, with respect to probabilistic and combinatorics curriculum content. This research has called into question the language often used in mathematics classrooms and has encouraged the pre-service teachers, and myself, to focus on mathematical language beyond a strictly dictionary definition.

Bio: I am very proud and thankful to live and work on Treaty 4, the ancestral lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, as well as the traditional homelands of the Métis. Regardless of the specific contextual focus for any particular work I am doing, my research agenda, teaching enactments and philosophy, service commitments, and life in general are all grounded in my understandings and accepted responsibility to the valuing of diversity and the creation of socially just practices, institutions, and interactions. I live in Regina with my two dogs, Euclid and Rusty.