Building partnerships with families and communities to support children's numeracy learning

The importance of building home, school and community partnerships is increasingly acknowledged since family and community involvement in education is thought to be associated with children’s success at school. This paper reports on aspects of an Australian Government commissioned research project that analysed educational partnerships aiming to enhance children’s numeracy education. Snapshots of two school case studies are presented to highlight features of effective partnerships and the kinds of numeracy learning they supported.

A sociocultural analysis of learning to teach

This paper addresses the question of how teachers learn from experience during their pre-service course and early years of teaching. It outlines a theoretical framework that may help us better understand how teachers' professional identities emerge in practice. The framework adapts Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, and Valsiner's Zone of Free Movement and Zone of Promoted Action, to the field of teacher education. The framework is used to analyse the pre-service and initial professional experiences of a novice secondary mathematics teacher in integrating computer and graphics calculator technologies into his classroom practice. (Contains 1 figure.) [For complete proceedings, see ED496848.]