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Profound understanding of emergent mathematics: broadening the construct of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge

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Abstract

We discuss the teachers’ disciplinary knowledge of mathematics in this article, arguing two main points as we report on a 2-year study involving 22 practicing teachers. First we argue that teachers’ knowledge of mathematics might be productively construed as a complex evolving form, a significant dimension of which is tacit knowledge. Second, based on our first point, we suggest that this knowledge is better understood as a learnable disposition than a domain to be mastered.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), the most recent reports of which are available at http://teds.educ.msu.edu/.

  2. The “M4T [mathematics-for-teaching] cohort” is the title of the Master’s of Education program that served as the context of the events described in this article.

  3. The term metarealizations might be better fit to the discussion here, given our usage of Sfard’s “realizations” in prior levels. However, for this writing, we use “metarepresentation” for two reasons. First, it is the term that was used during the concept study. Second, it is a term that can be found in the broader research literature.

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Davis, B., Renert, M. Profound understanding of emergent mathematics: broadening the construct of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge. Educ Stud Math 82, 245–265 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-012-9424-8

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