Using the flipped classroom instructional approach to foster a mathematics-anxious-friendly learning environment

This chapter examines the nature and characteristics of mathematics anxiety learning and provides instructional implications for highly mathematics-anxious learners, which are informed by lived experience. The discussion comes from research on the Mathematics Anxiety Learning Phenomenon (MALP), a hermeneutic phenomenological study using Wilber's Integral Model as the underpinning framework. Based on the lived experience data, hermeneutic themes were developed, and it is shown that those themes are capitalized upon in the flipped approach to foster a mathematics-anxious-friendly learning environment. Using the themes from the study, the chapter argues that the flipped approach could be beneficial to students who are highly mathematics-anxious. The system of linear equations with two variables, a common mathematics topic, is used to illustrate how the flipped approach to instructional design could recognize mathematics-anxious adult learners.