What if a mathematics problem could do more than ask students to find an answer?

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore how storytelling can transform familiar mathematics problems into opportunities for student agency, empathy, and meaningful engagement with the world- without sacrificing mathematical rigor.

Using examples inspired by children’s literature and real-world issues such as community needs, sustainability, food insecurity, and humanitarian design, participants will examine how stories can create authentic reasons for students to measure, model, compare, estimate, analyze data, and make mathematical decisions.

Participants will experience a practical framework:

Story → Notice → Question → Mathematics → Action

Rather than adding an unrelated service project after a mathematics lesson, this approach begins with the mathematics educators already teach and asks: Where could this mathematics help students understand something that matters?

Participants will analyze story-centered mathematical tasks and then work collaboratively to redesign a traditional problem from their own curriculum or a provided example. Throughout the process, they will consider three essential lenses: mathematical integrity, authenticity, and student agency.

Participants will leave with a reusable problem-rewriting framework, sample story-centered mathematics tasks, a planning template, and a problem they have begun redesigning for their own students. No new curriculum or program is required- the goal is to help educators see new possibilities within the mathematics they already teach.