How narratives about the secondary-tertiary transition shape undergraduate tutors’ sense-making of their teaching (original) (raw)
Related papers
2002
This paper reports from a research project at Oxford in the UK that focused (a) on university mathematics teachers' conceptualizations of first-year undergraduate teaching related to observation of their teaching; and (b) on issues relating the conceptualizations to mathematics as a discipline. This research builds on a qualitative study of learning difficulties of first year undergraduates in their encounter with the abstractions of advanced mathematics within a tutorial-based pedagogy. Six tutors' responses to and interpretations of such difficulties were studied in semi-structured interviews conducted during an 8-week university term and following minimally-participant observation of their tutorials. This paper describes a 4-stage spectrum of pedagogical development (SPD) that emerged from the analysis of the tutors' conceptualizations of the students' difficulties, descriptive accounts of the strategies they employ in order to facilitate their students' overcoming of these difficulties, and selfevaluative reflective accounts regarding their teaching practices. This study then exemplify the third and fourth stages of SPD thought a discussion of characteristic examples from the interview data. In these stages the tutors' strategies begin to resemble less a traditional induction process and more a process of facilitating the students' construction of mathematical meaning. This discussion employs tools from sociocultural, enactivist and constructivist theories on the teaching and learning of mathematics. In particular, the data used here exemplify certain tutor strategies to achieve consideration of students' needs. (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Knowledge revealed by tutors in discussion forums with maths teachers
Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, 2016
We aimed at investigating knowledge revealed by the tutors of a continuing education course for mathematics teachers offered at a distance. Initially, we observed the work of 32 tutors over a year, in order to typify their interventions in discussion forums with course participants. From the results, we offered training to a new group of tutors, in order to improve actions that we considered were below our expectations. Between August 2012 and July 2013, we observed six tutors who are the subjects of this research. An adaptation of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) theoretical framework was used in their training. This qualitative research made use of the observation of the tutors' work, which was analysed by means of discursive typologies found in tutors' interventions in discussion forums. Our analysis indicated that affective and attitu-dinal components play a key role in tutoring in this context.
The Reflective Practicum in the Process of Becoming a Teacher: The Tutor's Discursive Support
Education Sciences , 2019
Interest in reflective practices, within the broader framework of teachers' professional knowledge, has been ongoing in educational research for the past few decades. The idea from which reflection itself stems is that of teachers' agency in their own professional development. The initial positivist approach viewed the relationships between teachers' theoretical knowledge and educational practice in terms of hierarchical reductionism. We analyze the relationships between different types of knowledge from a historical-cultural perspective, which requires locating them in the context of the cultural activities. Our aim is to analyze the discursive interactions, which take place during collaborative seminars, within a reflective practicum, and to identify how the university tutors support and foster reflection on practice. We use a multiple case design in which each case is a classroom unit made up of a tutor and his or her students. An analysis of the tutors' discourse revealed an ongoing promotion of students' active engagement through highly structured classroom participation, a strong focus on interpreting students' personal experiences during teaching practice and significant interventions aimed at establishing links with academic knowledge. Results invite us to rethink the ways in which we can contribute to processes of reflection among trainee teachers.
Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 2015
There is a dearth of literature on Access to Higher Education (AHE) tutors, which this paper addresses. Tutors play an important part in constructing emotional and academic support for students. Understanding their constructions of professional identity and their views of the students they teach helps to explain the learning environments they create. The empirical qualitative data comes from a study of AHE students' and tutors' views of their experiences on AHE courses that was collected in seven rural and urban AHE-providing institutions in the East Midlands of England in 2012-2013. It was analysed using open or inductive coding to reflect the emphases given in their interviews by participants. Emerging findings suggest that tutors' commitment to 'second chance learning' arose, in part, from their own biographies and recognition of the disempowerment experienced by AHE students who were often economically disadvantaged and had had negative experiences of schooling and/or a period of work before joining the course. Tutors' sense of agency and identity and the cultures on AHE courses were negotiated each year through getting to know the students, meeting their extensive demands for support, directing their teaching and learning experiences and contesting the institutional contexts of the courses.
2021
Commognitive studies offer a nuanced lens on datasets that evidence micro-level accounts of mathematical experience – and are now starting to explore the theory’s capacity to support the design, tracing and dissecting of discursive shifts in medium/long term interventions. Here, we focus on two university mathematics education (UME) examples of such interventions. The Norway-based study engaged biology students with biology-themed Mathematical Modelling activities to challenge deficit narratives about the role of mathematics in their discipline and about their mathematical competence and confidence. The Brazil-based study engaged teachers with activities which feature mathematical practices from the past and in today’s mathematics classrooms to trigger changes in teachers’ narratives about how mathematics comes to be and how its emergence can be negotiated in the mathematics classroom. We show how the discursive shifts orchestrated by these interventions generate new narratives abou...
Tracing Teacher Learning through Shifts in Discourses: The Case of a Mathematics Teacher
This study presents a methodology for investigating teacher learning in and from practice based on discourses that are in constant flux and transformation. Conceptualizing teacher learning as a frame of meaning based on knowing and doing discourses, the ideas are illustrated through data collected from a secondary mathematics teacher conducting an inquiry of self-practice. Narrative analysis of the data from the teacher interviews was conducted along with classroom observations of the teacher's mathematical practice. The data supported that tracing shifts in teacher discourses enables to understand the connection between the teacher's past discourses and the present discourses when identifying teacher learning. It is concluded that tracking teacher learning through two complementary discourses of the teacher's instructional practice enabled a unification of individual and collective levels of the teacher learning by self-inquiry of own practice. Moreover, through the continuum of discourses, this study provided insights about the generation of new meanings through transformation of old meanings in the teacher learning.
Students' Accounts of Their Experiences of Learning Mathematics
2009
This research identifies important features of mathematics learning from the accounts of early school leavers. These students were enrolled in a Youth Reconnected Program at a Technical and Further Education [TAFE] college. Specifically, it examines the relationship between their experiences of mathematics learning in two different social contexts, the program and secondary school classrooms, the discourses and associated discursive practices of these two contexts, and the forms of identities of participation that are constructed in them. Drawing on a social theory of learning and critical discourse theory, the research identifies the processes by which membership in communities of learning is achieved and identities discursively constructed. It draws on the accounts of forty-three early school leavers and six staff members located in a Youth Reconnected Program, a program designed to re-engage early school leavers in education and or training, about their prior experiences of secon...
Revista de Investigación Educativa
Reflection is a vital component in professional teaching practices. The idea from which reflection itself stems is that of teachers' agency in their own professional development. Our study is rooted in recent research into the need to support processes of reflection among student teachers. From a historical-cultural perspective, our aim is to analyze the discursive interactions which take place during collaborative seminars in an innovation experience within a reflective Practicum, and to describe how the university tutors support and foster reflection on practice. We use a multiple case design in which each case is a classroom unit made up of a tutor and her students. We identified 24 types of discursive educational supports or Aids to Joint Reflection. Results indicate a profile characterized by the presence of aids related to three dimensions: dialogical, interpretative and theory-practice relationships. Contributions are made for the training of student teachers and for prac...
Learning to teach mathematics: The lesson de-briefing conversation
2019
In the United Kingdom it is typical for prospective teachers to teach lessons which are observed by a school-based mentor and a university tutor, following which there is a de-brief between those three, about the lesson. In this chapter, we will explore the significance of these de-briefing conversations, within the broader process of becoming a teacher of mathematics. There has been limited attention given to ways of conducting the lesson de-brief within the mathematics education literature, but there are many characterisations of mentoring relationships, which have implications for such discussions. We analyse the practice that has developed at the University of Bristol, making use of fictionalised accounts, based on our experiences. Our particular de-briefing practice appears to be highly effective in allowing prospective teachers to identify and become committed to next steps in their development as teachers. We put forward some tentative reasons for why what we do is effective, linked to our overall enactivist perspective on the process of becoming a teacher of mathematics.