Search

This paper focuses on the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education's (SAARMSTE's) role as a platform supporting research dissemination and connecting researchers in early grades mathematics (EGM) in the Southern African region. A review of the Long Papers in SAARMSTE over the last 20 years supports the finding of the other review papers in this Special Issue: that there has been substantial growth of attention to EGM since 2013. However, two distinctions are marked when looking at conference papers rather than journal papers. Firstly, there is a particularly large expansion of work in the last 5 years, with a broadening base of participation in this work. Second, looking across all the formats of conference presentations indicates SAARMSTE's role in supporting and building EGM as a key focus of research attention, and bringing together regional and international groups with interests in this area. Given that conference proceedings usually offer a broader picture of emerging interests than journal papers, we reflect on the range of foci of attention within EGM in the SAARMSTE Proceedings, and trends within this. These trends also help us to point to areas that are likely to be of key interest in the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflective practice is a crucial element of professional growth that is gaining in popularity in teacher education, yet the ability to reflect is a skill that is neither natural nor easy to develop. This paper reports on an investigation that sought to establish if pre-service teachers at a South African university – in the process of learning to reflect on practice through analysing video-recorded lessons – reflected differently when reflecting on their own practice from the way they reflected on the practice of other teachers. Pre-service teachers were introduced to the Six Lens Framework as a tool to aid reflection on mathematics teaching. The authors compared two sets of reflections written by four pre-service teachers (PSTs) who participated in the study. One set was based on a video-recorded lesson of another teacher's practice while the other was based on a video-recording of their own practice. The study found that the PSTs' reflections in both cases were generally at the lowest level of the reflection spectrum. They mostly described classroom events rather than analysing the lessons to provide explanation suggestions, or reflectivity. We found, however, that all four PSTs reflected at substantially greater length on their own lessons than on those of other teachers. Furthermore, three of the four teachers' reflections on their own practice focused on mathematical rather than general aspects and provided more suggestions for improvement than their reflections on the practice of other teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a broader study that draws on Wenger's (Wenger, E.: 1998, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, New Work) social practice perspective to investigate teacher learning. The study extends Wenger's complex model of interrelated components of leaning (as meaning, practice, identity and community) to describe and explain teacher learning that occurs within a mathematics senior-phase in-service program that was stimulated by curriculum change. The study uses qualitative ethnography in which the researcher performs the dual role of both coordinator and researcher of the in-service practice. In a longitudinal study the phenomenon of confidence emerged in teachers' descriptions and explanations of their learning. In this paper I explore this phenomenon both empirically and theoretically. The extension of Wenger's (1998) theory to include the overarching and interacting component of confidence is embedded in and derived from data analysis of 10 teachers' learning, over a 2-year period, during a time of radical curriculum change. Since it would be incoherent within this framework to draw on psychological explanations of confidence I set out to explore confidence from within a social practice frame in a way that is grounded in data of the teachers in this study. The paper offers a concept of confidence in relation to teacher learning as 'learning as mastery', and confidence as both a product and a process of learning. Teachers can at once state their confidence as mathematics teachers, and their confidence to admit to what they do not know and still need to learn. It is argued that this is a primary condition for ongoing learning in a profession like mathematics teaching. In addition, the paper provides a critique of the applicability of Wenger's work to the context of teacher education and in particular highlights the absence of the notion of confidence within his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Rituals and explorations in mathematical teaching and learning: introduction to the special issue", written by Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim and Mellony Graven, was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 21 March 2019 without open access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key intervention of the South African Numeracy Chair Project (SANCP) since 2011 has been the introduction of mathematics (or maths) clubs, which occur in the out-of-school time space. In 2016 the maths club concept was developed into a 15-week Pushing for Progression (PfP) teacher development programme which supports primary school mathematics teachers to run clubs beyond the SANCP local area. Expanding intervention models beyond local schools is imperative in the second phase of the SANCP (2016–2020). Working from a mixed methods methodological approach, the researchers collected pre- and post-data for a 4-operations assessment of the entire PfP programme. In this article they share learner data from one of the nine teachers who participated in the PfP maths club programme in the Uitenhague District, Eastern Cape, South Africa, to illuminate how partnerships between academics, district officials and teachers can enable powerful student learning in the club space. They argue further that within the tightly focused development programme run by teachers in this one district, it is possible for learners to make substantive progress in mathematical proficiency (MP) (especially procedural fluency and conceptual understanding) when comparing scores and learner methods between a pre- and post- assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]