Classroom research as teacher-researcher

In the field of education, research projects that involve both the researcher and teacher being the same person are common today, as attested by the significant number of teacher-researcher studies. One issue confronting the dual role of teacher-researcher is the nature of interaction between the underlying goals that come with each of these roles. There are some researchers who express concern that the combination of these goals within the teacher-researcher may compromise either or both of the work of teaching and research in an unproductive way. This paper is an account of my adventure in attempting to fulfil both teaching and research goals in my work as teacher-researcher in a year 7 (Secondary One) geometry class in Singapore. My experience is then re-interpreted in the context of the ongoing conflicting-versus-complementary talk on the interaction between teacher/researcher ‘selves’. A model is proposed to account for the seemingly opposite sides of the camp as reported in the literature on this issue.

Multi-theoretic approaches to understanding the science classroom

Multi-camera on-site video technology and post-lesson video stimulated interviews were used in a purposefully inclusive research design to generate a complex data set amenable to parallel analyses from several complementary theoretical perspectives. The symposium reports the results of parallel analyses employing positioning theory, systemic functional linguistics, distributed cognition and representational analysis of the same nine-lesson sequence in a single science classroom during the teaching of a single topic: States of Matter. Without contesting the coherence and value of a well-constructed mono-theoretic research study, the argument is made that all such studies present an inevitably partial account of a setting as complex as the science classroom: privileging some aspects and ignoring others. In this symposium, the first presentation examined the rationale for multi-theoretic research designs, highlighting the dangers of the circular amplification of those constructs predetermined by the choice of theory and outlining the intended benefits of multi-theoretic designs that offer less partial accounts of classroom practice. The second and third presentations reported the results of analyses of the same lesson sequence on the topic “states of matter” using the analytical perspectives of positioning theory and systemic functional linguistics. The final presentation reported the comparative analysis of student learning of density over the same three lessons from distributed cognition and representational perspectives. The research design promoted a form of reciprocal interrogation, where the analyses provided insights into classroom practice and the comparison of the analyses facilitated the reflexive interrogation of the selected theories, while also optimally anticipating the subsequent synthesis of the interpretive accounts generated by each analysis of the same setting for the purpose of informing instructional advocacy.

Increasing access to mathematical thinking

This article is a contribution to understanding of teacher actions that can contribute to a successful mathematics learning experience, defined as one that engages all students, especially those who may sometimes feel alienated from mathematics and schooling, in productive and successful mathematical thinking and learning. We offer an example of a task that can form the basis of such a learning experience. The key elements are that the task is open-ended, that the teacher offers specific pedagogical prompts to support student leaning, that the teacher builds a sense of community by ensuring that there are some common experiences, and the teacher prepare prompts that can be used to support students who are experiencing difficulty, or to extend those students who complete the
basic task readily.

Teacher actions to maximize mathematics learning opportunities in heterogeneous classrooms

The basic unit of school based mathematics teaching is the lesson. This article is a contribution to understanding teacher actions that facilitate successful lessons, defined as those that engage all students, especially those who may sometimes feel alienated from mathematics and schooling, in productive and successful mathematical thinking and learning. An underlying assumption is that lessons can seek to build a sense in the students that their experience has elements in common with the rest of the class and that this can be done through attention to particular aspects of the mathematical and socio-mathematical goals. We examine three teacher actions that address the mathematical goals: using open-ended tasks, preparing prompts to support students experiencing difficulty, and posing extension tasks to students who finish the set tasks quickly; as well as actions that address the socio-mathematical goals by making classroom processes explicit. To illustrate and elaborate these actions, we describe a particular lesson taught to a heterogeneous upper primary (age 11–12) class.

Using activity theory in researching young children's use of calculators

Constructivist and socio-cultural perspectives in mathematics education highlight the crucial role that activity plays in mathematical development and learning. Activity theory provides a socio-cultural lens to help analyse human behaviour, including that which occurs in classrooms. It provides a framework for co-ordinating constructivist and socio-cultural perspectives in mathematics learning. In this paper, we adopt Cole and Engeström's (1991) model of activity theory to examine the mediation offered by the calculator as a tool for creating and supporting learning processes of young children in the social environment of their classroom. By adopting this framework, data on young children's learning outcomes in number, when given free access to calculators, can be examined not only in terms of the mediating role of the calculator, but also within the broader context of the classroom community, the teachers' beliefs and intentions, and the classroom norms and the division of labour. Use of this model in a post hoc situation suggests that activity theory can play a significant role in the planning of future classroom research.

Spoken mathematics as a distinguishing characteristics of mathematics classrooms in different countries

This paper reports research into the occurrence of spoken mathematics in some well-taught classrooms in Australia, China (both Shanghai and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea and the USA. The analysis distinguished one classroom from another on the basis of public “oral interactivity” (the number of utterances in whole class and teacher-student interactions in each lesson) and “mathematical orality” (the frequency of occurrence of key mathematical terms in each lesson). Our concern in this analysis was to document the opportunity provided to students for the oral articulation of the relatively sophisticated mathematical terms that formed the conceptual content of the lesson. Classrooms characterized by high public oral interactivity were not necessarily sites of high mathematical orality. The contribution of student-student conversations also varied significantly. Of particular interest are the different learning theories implicit in the role accorded to spoken mathematics in each classroom.

Strangely familiar: teacher-researchers rethinking literacy pedagogies in digital environments

This article reports on a collaborative project between middle school teachers and university researchers exploring the impact of a one to one netbook program on literacy teaching and learning at one Australian primary school. Following the traditions of ethnographic classroom research and practitioner research in literacy, we describe and analyse the evolution of teacher knowledge and understandings informing the processes of reshaping print based literacy pedagogies and practices within digital learning environments. The study sought to explore the possibilities of one-to-one computing through an investigation of the affordances of digital literacy pedagogies within an open plan learning environment. We focus on the richness of ethnographic tools, in particular visual ethnographic methods, for "making the familiar strange" and identify contexts supporting the emergence of innovative digital literacy pedagogies and powerful professional learning in primary classrooms. Drawing on surveys, interviews and conversations with teachers and students and classroom observations, we suggest that dialogues between teachers and researchers provide a forum for co-construction of insights into innovative digital literacy pedagogies and offer rich learning opportunities for students, teachers and researchers.