Data reasoning and digital literacy skills, especially the ability to find, represent, and accurately interpret the relevant data, are critical in workplaces and lifetime experiences. Given the importance of developing data reasoning skills from learners' experiences, this article aims to describe teacher and student actions that contributed to the student explorations of data from life experiences. The authors share a COVID-19 lesson as an example of how a framework that can be used to support student exploration of current issues and represent them mathematically might be applied to support students as they explore data. The authors focused on COVID-19 because it has tremendously affected the world and their students' lives. Disinformation (i.e., misleading information that deliberately circulated) and misinformation about COVID-19 were widely disseminated across the internet, endangering lives and hampering recovery. The student autonomy allowed in this exploration (e.g., the choice of topics and mathematical questions, collaborators, and presentation modalities) enables the inspiration and diverse perspectives shared by students. [Note: The page range (122-129) shown on the abstract page is incorrect. The correct page range is 122-130.]