“When will I ever use this in my life?”

“When will I ever use this in my life?” – That is the eternal classroom question. 

Framing the mandated curriculum through a local problem is one way teachers can help students bridge the school – life connection. My story of an effort towards this begins in 2018. Inspired by my 2015-16 MERIT fellowship, I took a Global Project Based Learning (PBL) course through KCI. My goal was to reimagine a signature architecture project. In the original project, refined over many iterations, my seventh graders developed their understanding of scale, area, percent, problem-solving and geometric construction as they designed and constructed model homes. It was already a good project and many noted it as their highlight of the year. Still, I knew it could do more. 

I live in San Jose where housing insecurity has been an ongoing local concern. In 2017, our city council approved a “Tiny Homes for the Homeless” pilot project where they would build 40 interim-housing micro-sleeping cabins. This local event became my inspiration for reimagining the architecture project. I reached out to Ray Bramson of Destination Home to help me and my students grasp the problem and the city’s proposed intervention. With the structure of the KCI Global PBL Course, I applied the design thinking principles I’d learned in MERIT to both redesign the unit and introduce students to their task: 

Fast forward to 2025. To date, four different cohorts of students have completed this project with each successive one benefiting from iterative lessons learned. Currently, San Jose has 8 interim housing communities with more planned. The 204-unit tiny homes village in my neighborhood, Homekey Branham Lane, had its grand opening this past February. Three years ago it was an empty lot and encampment site. It is of particular importance to me and my students because it was the site that many of their projects were based on. 

“Bridge [interim] housing is not a homelessness solution on its own. It’s one response that works alongside others to help get people into permanent housing,”  Ray Bramson explained to my students in the Spring of 2018 during his first classroom visit. Years later, he was wowed by the plans that a subsequent cohort presented to him for the Branham Lane site. As they planned, each team considered a different user-group, from families with young children to veterans to immigrants. With unlimited budgets, they imagined full-service communities with employment, health, and child-care resources. One team even worked in transportation concerns with an on-site CalTrain stop to take advantage of the tracks that run adjacent to the site. Over the years they used different resources for drafting their plans, including the freely available Homestyler app, a less-frills Really Sketch app, and most students favorite – large graph paper, pencil, and a good eraser. The project’s life has spanned over the pandemic when many teams collaborated effectively virtually. Students’ success at deeply examining and mathematicizing this local problem has put them on the path to being global thinkers of tomorrow.

How might you support students on a similar path? What do your students care about? Do you have a signature project that can be reworked through the lens of a local or global issue? What about a signature lesson? Working on this project has given me the practice to transform basic math lessons into more compelling ones. In a single lesson, we’ve…

• applied integers and percent to mathematically model a no money bail ballot initiative;
• discussed rates through the perspective of inmate firefighters during a harsh fire season;
• used percent difference and piecewise functions to explore gender-based price discrimination and income inequality;
• explored aspects of personal finance, including financing college, through percent and/or linear vs. exponential functions.

The possibilities for empowering students through what we already teach are limitless. We need not be perfect; the ambitious homelessness website I planned out in my head has been underway for years and is still incomplete. Still, my students and I have come very far with just a desire to be bold. That is the first ingredient. It takes but a little ingenuity and design thinking finesse to poise our students as powerful thinkers. I hope my story has inspired you to embark on that journey with your students.

Footnotes:

• Krystal Jones will present a workshop on Social Consciousness Meets Design Thinking & PBL: Exploring Housing Insecurity on Thursday 10/16 from 8-9:15 am at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual Conference & Exposition in Atlanta, GA
• KCI’s MERIT program, which explores design thinking, accepts applications in…. See… for a list of current KCI offerings.