‘Walking in a Foreign and Unknown Landscape’ : studying the history of mathematics in initial teacher education

This article develops the argument that students in initial teacher education benefit in terms of who they are becoming from developing awareness of and engagement in the history of mathematics. Initially, current school mathematics practices in the UK are considered and challenged. Then the role of teachers’ relationship to mathematical subject knowledge and of teachers’ engagement in critical thinking are considered. Connections are made between these concerns and studying the history of mathematics in initial teacher education classrooms. I then draw on the perspectives and practices of the mathematics teacher educators at one institution to understand these connections better and to exemplify them. Issues of equity are threaded throughout

A software tool for simulating practical chemistry

A software package has been written to allow a user to build and manipulate a simple chemistry experiment. Using a toolbox of equipment the apparatus can be interactively designed and the necessary chemicals added from a database. Selection of the appropriate physical and reaction conditions allows the experiment to be run both in real and virtual time, snapshots of the experiment being stored for subsequent modification and replay. The structure of the reaction data file allows any reaction to be designed with yields and both forward and backward reaction rates. Thus, the user has the opportunity to experiment with the best apparatus layout, reactant composition and physical conditions in order to achieve an optimal result. Some extensions of the current software are discussed

Learning in harmony

Learning in Harmony: a narrative case study to explore ethos creation and subsequent lessons for leadership Schools shape future generations and play an enormous role in the support and learning of our young people. The vision of a school and how it determines an ethos or school climate, is often seen as a central part of the drive and development of the learning community. As educators, we must consider how and by whom, a vision is established, articulated and communicated, and what makes it become a shared belief, seen in both policy and practice. This research is an ethnographic case study considering a specific learning environment, The Music House, over a period of 15 years from 1990 to 2005, through the retrospective adult narratives of students, staff and trainee teachers involved during this time. Questionnaires, interviews and group discussions involving a sample drawn from respondents, were analysed and evaluated in a consideration of how the climate of the Music House was introduced and developed, looking at the nature of participants involvement, their understanding of the vision, how it was shaped, understood and absorbed, and occasions when values were demonstrated and challenged. With three central themes of relationships, safety and opportunities growing from the research, the narratives give a unique student viewpoint, through adult eyes over a substantial research period. The writing reflects experiences, feelings and ideas of the participants, treating them both as individuals, and identifying links and similarities in their thinking across the sample. There is a consideration of the legacy impact of the community on individuals. Findings are reviewed to highlight possible lessons to learn, particularly for leaders within the current educational climate, indicating elements of school life for priority, applicable in any school settin

Learning Mathematics without Limits and All-attainment Grouping in Secondary Schools: Pete's story

This article is about Pete’s story. It is a story about introducing all attainment teaching in a secondary school mathematics department and about espousing and enacting a pedagogy and set of practices to enable learning mathematics without limits

Acoustic data-driven lexicon learning based on a greedy pronunciation selection framework

Speech recognition systems for irregularly-spelled languages like English normally require hand-written pronunciations. In this paper, we describe a system for automatically obtaining pronunciations of words for which pronunciations are not available, but for which transcribed data exists. Our method integrates information from the letter sequence and from the acoustic evidence. The novel aspect of the problem that we address is the problem of how to prune entries from such a lexicon (since, empirically, lexicons with too many entries do not tend to be good for ASR performance). Experiments on various ASR tasks show that, with the proposed framework, starting with an initial lexicon of several thousand words, we are able to learn a lexicon which performs close to a full expert lexicon in terms of WER performance on test data, and is better than lexicons built using G2P alone or with a pruning criterion based on pronunciation probability