Reintroduciendo actividades etnomatemáticas maoríes en el aula: conceptos tradicionales maoríes de orientación espacial

Māori mathematical practices were excluded from schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand for over 150 years as a result of explicit policies precluding the use of the Indigenous language and culture. As a consequence of the range of assimilationist policies, by the 1970s, the Māori language was considered endangered. In response to the perilous state of the language, Māori communities set up their own schools, initially outside of the state system, to support the revitalisation of the language and culture. However, the reintroduction of the cultural knowledge in areas such as mathematics has not matched language revitalisation efforts. Many original ethnomathematical practices are no longer in general use in the Indigenous community and the practices valued by the European majority remain the norm in the state-mandated school curricula. Spatial orientation is an example of the mathematics curricula content that is based on Western mathematical perspectives. To provide a Māori perspective, this paper draws on interviews with elders and historical data to examine Māori spatial orientation terms and the spatial frames of references that they are derived from. Students in a Māori-medium school were tested on their understanding of this traditional knowledge. As a consequence, a series of learning activities based on Māori spatial orientation concepts were developed and trialled. The outcomes of these learning activities showed some increased understandings about Māori spatial orientation concepts

The professional identities of prospective mathematics teachers who teach through programming

As has been the case in many countries around the world, the new Norwegian curriculum from 2020 included programming as part of mathematics education. However, little is known about how prospective teachers perceive this addition in regard to their developing professional identities. When the results from an electronic survey of 394 prospective teachers showed unexpected findings, five of the subjects were asked to participate in a focus group interview in order to explore some of these results. The focus group interview was conducted to understand how prospective teachers considered the past, present and future aspects of their professional identities as teachers of mathematics through programming. The results reveal that, although the prospective teachers had little experience of programming, they were positive regarding its implementation in mathematics lessons because they identified themselves as digital natives; they therefore believed that learning to program would be easy. They aligned themselves with their students, as masters of technology, in contrast to their future colleagues, whom they implicitly described as digital immigrants. The findings of this study have implications for teacher education. Even if the prospective teachers have a positive attitude toward programming and consider themselves digitally competent, a limited understanding of how programming can be integrated into their mathematics teaching will affect the identities that they see for themselves as teachers who teach mathematics through programming.publishedVersio

Preservice and inservice teachers’ views on digital tools for diverse learners in mathematics education

Source at https://ncm.gu.se/nomad/.Although teachers are expected to use digital tools in their mathematics teaching in many countries, little is known about preservice and inservice teachers’ digital competence, especially in relationship to specific groups of school students. Results from a survey of 394 preservice teachers and 61 inservice teachers, at three Norwegian institutions, provide information on how they considered different digital tools would support differentiated teaching, related to a student’s mathematical progress, and in multilingual classes. The results suggest that preservice and inservice teachers evaluated similarly the usefulness of different digital tools for differentiated mathematics teaching and in multilingual classrooms. However, for the majority of tools, the standard deviations indicate that the responses were somewhat spread, suggesting uncertainty in how they could use digital tools to support specific groups of students

When do I get to say we?

<html /

Only two more sleeps until the school holidays : One child’s home experiences of measurement

Children bring a wealth of mathematical knowledge from home to school. This paper describes one six/seven year old girl’s home interactions over 20 weeks about measurable quantities. Almost all measurement discussions occurred when actions were not straight-forward. Consequently the measurement attributes usually used to introduce measurement at school, such as length, were rarely discussed because actions associated with them could be done without discussion. Time was discussed more often than any other attributes. Although time is considered difficult to learn because of its abstract nature, it may in fact be an easier concept for introducing ideas of iteration

Upsetting the norms of teacher education

Traditionally, multicultural education is not seen as something that those from the mainstream need to concern themselves with unless it is as a holiday fill-in activity. Intercultural education on the other hand explores the responsibility for the construction of culture by mainstream society. In this article, I explore my role in the delivering of mathematics education courses in teacher education programs in three countries: New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden. I focus on my attempts to raise mainstream as well as minority students’ awareness of intercultural understandings. Different approaches, including the use of storytelling, were used to match local circumstances but all had the same aim of making preservice teachers reappraise the role that mathematics education has in marginalising some children's cultural backgrounds