Immigrant Children Learning Mathematics in Mainstream Schools

We understand the schooling of the immigrant children as a transition process, because when they arrive into a new country they have to cope with the many changes involved in moving from one culture to another. In particular, they have moved from one school culture into another, if they have attended school, or perhaps they have moved from a ‘no-schooling’ culture into a school culture. We regard immigrant students as having the need to build a bridge from the meanings of their initial situation to those of the present one. All of them have the right to be offered the opportunity to develop their potentialities to the full, regardless of their country of origin or the reasons for their migration. We believe that school should contribute to help them create a continuity between their home and the host culture’s meanings. From that point of view, and not avoiding the researchers’ commitments to society and particularly to teachers and students, the goal of our study is to find teaching approaches that contribute to co-construct the students’ transition in order to make it as smooth as possible. We say ‘co-constructing the transitions’ because a one-sided construction would not be complete, since the meanings a child brings to a situation, as Bruner states, ‘are not to his own advantage unless he can get them shared with others’ (1990, p. 13). Everyone involved in the dynamics of the mathematics classroom has to participate in the negotiation of the meanings associated with the diverse situations, in order to ensure a real sharing of them (Kao & Tienda, 1998).