Listening to students' voices in mathematics education

In many tertiary institutions, mathematics education staff teach courses from early childhood education through to professional development courses at Masters level. Similarly, research into teacher education processes spans these contexts. Common principles that underpin this work include staff willingness to be responsive to students’ needs. This symposium focuses on the importance of listening to students’ voices in mathematics teaching and research – no matter how old students are.

QTP in Victoria: listening to teachers leads to quality professional development

How do you get information and communication technology working for authentic learning across the curriculum? It depends on quality professional development. The author draws on her research and evaluation work on a Quality Teacher Program pilot project by the Victorian Department of Education and Training to explain why listening to teachers is leading to just that.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young Bengali-Australian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.'

Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices.

I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasi-traditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge.

In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.

Listening to student opinions about group assessment.

This paper illustrates the way two teacher-researchers are listening to mathematics education students’ voices in a Masters course. Group assignments have their advantages but it is difficult to ensure strong collaboration, high-level analysis and discussion, a good spread of work between group members, and positive social interactions. This research set out to explore one way of attending to these problems in a mathematics education Masters unit. Students submitted (unmarked) individual essays before combining them to create (graded) group assignments. They completed surveys about group work before and after this activity, and some were interviewed. Expecting individual work before group work led to increased levels of engagement, very high quality work, use of skills in analysis and critique, and good levels of student satisfaction.

Hidden stories : listening to the audience at the live performance

This paper explores how audiences describe and evaluate their experience of a live performance. Much of the arts marketing literature measures audience satisfaction with the entire event, including pre and post show talks, parking, ticket price, seating, merchandise and refreshments. Research undertaken at a range of live performing arts events in 2008 and 2009 revealed ‘hidden stories’ of audience members’ responses to performances. These responses are indicative of four aspects of the audience experience – knowledge, risk, authenticity and collective engagement. The stories, and their indicators, are the audience measure of quality of performance. This paper uses audience research at three contemporary theatre companies, to test and validate the audience experience as a new quality assessment instrument: the Arts Audience Experience Index.

Listening to different voices

The paper reports on a larger study carried out in the island state of Tasmania, Australia, between 1996 1998. The research reviewed the impact of the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities Policy (ISDP 1995) within the government school system between 1996-1998.

This Qualitative study interprets and critically analyses the stories of five key informants - a parent, two teachers (a support teacher and a class teacher), a policy maker and a university academic - during the early period of the implementation of the IDSP (1995). The visual and literary 'data stories' produced through the study narrate inclusive schooling in the Tasmanian context as a 'detective story' of the special education knowledge tradition, originating from the policy makers' reality rather than from the transformative experience of developing pedagogical models and processes in classrooms and communities.

The paper presents an argument for a poststructuralist approach to research and policy writing/reading that questions traditionalist theorising in the special education field and populist slogans of 'inclusion'.

Peers and pragmatics : listening to ESL students in a mainstream Australian school

This paper discusses a listening initiative aimed at assisting newly arrived ESL adolescents to meet the sociolinguistic challenges they faced in an Australian school. Proponents of a mainstream approach to ESL learning maintain that immersing students into age appropriate classrooms with native speakers provides superior opportunities for ESL students to those of a language school. Listening to native speaking peers is viewed as a way to accelerate sociolinguistic learning. Yet the school where this study took place acknowledged that many of the ESL students were quickly marginalized rather than supported within the school environment, and their academic success was erratic. A listening based initiative was introduced to raise awareness of pragmatics, the knowledge of meaning in context. Observed instances of communication analysed in this paper typify those likely to isolate ESL adolescents in their early years of mainstream secondary school. Furthermore, the positive impact of the outlined peer listening intervention on social inclusion as a precursor of significant language development is demonstrated. This case study has curriculum and welfare implications relevant to schools offering ESL students mainstream education.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

This paper discusses issues that arose for me when I interviewed an Odissi dancer about her learning this Indian dance form, travelling as she did from Australia to Orissa to spend several months of each year over an 11-year period to live with her guru, the late Sanjukta Panigrahi. The issues I discuss are the problems associated with making a text from a live encounter, and the choice of perspectives used in analysing that text. Drawing on discussions by ethnographers, anthropologists and others about the role of poetics in intercultural research, and on my own dance experience, I reflect on my ‘positioning’ in the various stages of the research. I go on to propose that the live, the temporal and what is remembered in the body are important, potentially poetic modalities of knowledge, which can easily be elided in academically validated ways of thinking and doing.