Abstract
This chapter explores the development and student uptake of a five-year-old course in “History of Mathematics for Teachers” as part of a secondary teacher education program. In the design of this 13-week course, choices had to be made about which aspects, eras and cultures’ history of mathematics to include, what pedagogies to use to engage future secondary teachers with math history in meaningful ways, what the ‘big picture’ message(s) and take-aways might be from this course (i.e., the pedagogical intentions of the course), which resources could be drawn on to bring these intentions to reality. Once the instructor had made these design decisions, and made a series of mid-course adjustments to adapt to student requests and suggestions, there remains the question of student uptake of these intentions and design decisions. Were the intentions understood by learners, and were they effective in promoting an attention to historic consciousness, diversity in many dimensions, and to supporting new teachers’ flexible thinking and design approaches for their own teaching? Course syllabi, blog posts and student writing are used to explore these questions in presenting this particular course as a case study for further work on inclusion of the history of mathematics for diversity in teacher education.
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Gerofsky, S. (2023). The Potential in Teaching the History of Mathematics to Pre-service Secondary School Teachers. In: Romero Sanchez, S., Serradó Bayés, A., Appelbaum, P., Aldon, G. (eds) The Role of the History of Mathematics in the Teaching/Learning Process. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29900-1_10
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