Perspectives On Practice And Meaning In Mathematics And Science Classrooms

This is a variegated picture of science and mathematics classrooms that challenges a research tradition that converges on the truth. The reader is surrounded with different images of the classroom and will find his beliefs confirmed or challenged. The book is for educational researchers, research students, and practitioners with an interest in optimizing the effectiveness of classrooms as environments for learning.

The term used in the title of this volume--thinking practices--evokes questions that the authors of the chapters within it begin to answer: What are thinking practices? What would schools and other learning settings look like if they were organized for the learning of thinking practices? Are thinking practices general, or do they differ by disciplines? If there are differences, what implications do those differences have for how we organize teaching and learning? How do perspectives on learning, cognition, and culture affect the kinds of learning experiences children and adults have? This volume describes advances that have been made toward answering these questions. These advances involve several agendas, including increasing interdisciplinary communication and collaboration; reconciling research on cognition with research on teaching, learning, and school culture; and strengthening the connections between research and school practice. The term thinking practices is symbolic of a combination of theoretical perspectives that have contributed to the volume editors' understanding of how people learn, how they organize their thinking inside and across disciplines, and how school learning might be better organized. By touring through some of the perspectives on thinking and learning that have evolved into school learning designs, Greeno and Goldman begin to establish a frame for what they are calling thinking practices. This volume is a significant contribution to a topic that they believe will continue to emerge as a coherent body of scientific and educational research and practice.

This volume grew out of a symposium on discourse, tools, and instructional design at Vanderbilt University in 1995 that brought together a small international group to grapple with issues of communicating, symbolizing, modeling, and mathematizing, particularly as these issues relate to learning in the classroom. The participants invited to develop chapters for this book--all internationally recognized scholars in their respective fields--were selected to represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives including mathematics education, cognitive science, sociocultural theory, and discourse theory. The work is distinguished by the caliber of the contributors, the significance of the topics addressed in the current era of reform in mathematics education, and the diversity of perspectives taken to a common set of themes and issues. The book is intended for those who are seeking to expand their understanding of the complexity of learning in order to enhance the learning experiences students have in schools, primarily researchers, instructional designers, and graduate students in mathematics education, as well as those in other fields including science education, instructional design in general, discourse theory, and semiotics.

Mathematics teaching and learning have been dominated by a concern for the intellectual readiness of the child, debates over rote learning versus understanding and, recently, mathematical processes and thinking. The gaze into today's mathematics classroom is firmly focused on the individual learner. Recently, however, studies of mathematics in social practices, including the market place and the home, have initiated a shift of focus. Culture has become identified as a key to understanding the basis on which the learner appropriates meaning. The chapters in this timely book attempt to engage with this shift of focus and offer original contributions to the debate about mathematics teaching and learning. They adopt theoretical perspectives while drawing on the classroom as both the source of investigation and the site of potential change and development. The book will be of fundamental interest to lecturers and researchers and to teachers concerned with the classroom as a cultural phenomenon.

This volume is a forward–looking intersection of Sociological perspectives on mathematics classrooms and socio-political perspectives on mathematics education. The first perspective has generated a substantial body of knowledge in the mathematics education. Interactionist research has deepened our understanding of interaction processes, socio-mathematical norms and the negotiation of meaning, generating a ‘micro-sociology’ or a ‘micro-ethnography’ of the mathematics classroom. More recently, socio-political perspectives on mathematics education interrelate educational practices in mathematics with macro-social issues of social equity, class, and race and with the policies that regulate institutionalized mathematics education. This book documents, strings together and juxtaposes research that uses ethnographical classroom data to explain, on the one hand, how socio-political issues play out in the mathematics class. On the other hand, it illuminates how class, race etc. affect the micro-sociology of the mathematics classroom. The volume advances the knowledge in the field by providing an empirical grounding of socio-political research on mathematics education, and it extends the frame in which mathematical classroom cultures are conceived.

The rapid development of video technology in the last decade has changed the ways in which people communicate, how they learn, and how research is done. Video technology offers rich potential in capturing complex social interactions over a prolonged period of time and in supporting teacher professional learning and development. This book explores the ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenges associated with the different uses of video in research, ranging from video as a tool for investigating social interactions and for stimulating participants’ reflection, to the use of video for engaging varied communities and social groups in the process of teaching, learning and research. Each chapter presents the authors’ critical reflection on the ways in which video was employed, the research decisions made, the methodological challenges faced, and the consequences for how educational practices were understood. As such, it illustrates a wide range of philosophical and theoretical standpoints with respect to video-based research approaches. This book will stimulate broad and rich discussion among education researchers who are interested in video research and contributes to: advancing knowledge of the field; developing approaches to dealing with emergent ethical, theoretical, and methodological issues; and generating new protocols and guidelines for conducting video-based research across a variety of disciplinary areas in education.

This book reports the accounts of researchers investigating the eighth grade mathematics classrooms of teachers in Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, The Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden and the USA. This combination of countries gives good representation to different European and Asian educational traditions, affluent and less affluent school systems, and mono-cultural and multi-cultural societies. Researchers within each local group focused their analyses on those aspects of practice and meaning most closely aligned with the concerns of the local school system and the theoretical orientation of the researchers. Within any particular educational system, the possibilities for experimentation and innovation are limited by more than just methodological and ethical considerations: they are limited by our capacity to conceive possible alternatives. They are also limited by our assumptions regarding acceptable practice. These assumptions are the result of a long local history of educational practice, in which every development was a response to emergent local need and reflective of changing local values. Well-entrenched practices sublimate this history of development. The Learner’s Perspective Study is guided by a belief that we need to learn from each other. The resulting chapters offer deeply situated insights into the practices of mathematics classrooms in twelve countries: an insider’s perspective.

This open access book provides key insights into the social fundamentals of learning and indications of social interactive modes conducive and restrictive of that learning in China. Combining theoretical and technical advances in an innovative research design, this book focuses on collaborative problem solving in mathematics to increase the visibility of social interactions in teachers’ designing, students’ learning and teachers’ instructional intervention. It also explores students’ cognitive and social interaction as well as teacher intervention in students’ group collaboration.