As a mathematics teacher educator, I try my best to prepare student teachers to go into schools with a repertoire of perspectives and approaches to use in practice, with a critical awareness of the education system in the greater whole, and so on. But I feel that I know way too little about what they actually learn in their teacher education, and what they do with it later on.
A review of literature on mathematics teacher learning revealed to me that
knowledge about how teachers learn in and from practice is limited, as
is knowledge of how they adapt content from their teacher education. Perhaps such knowledge would be useful in informing adaptation, selection and
sequencing of content in mathematics teacher education?
It would also be useful for assisting student teachers' transition into the profession, for later
interventions with teachers, and for support to retain and develop
teachers in the profession.
The TRACE research project was formulated to further knowledge about how mathematics student teachers and newly graduated mathematics teachers learn, about their
participation in school practices, and about how they develop a teacher
identity.
The 'tracing' comes in because we focus on how the content and experiences from
teacher education is recontextualised by student teachers in their last
year and teachers new to the profession.
We have now collected data in the project for a year, and have started to analyse and write up results. As always in such projects, it raises more questions than it provides answers, both about the research and about mathematics teacher education. In this blog, I will engage some of these issues, and I hope it will lead to constructive dialogues with other mathematics teacher educators/researchers.
