Abstract
A developmental research project in Norway, Learning Communities in Mathematics (LCM), a collaboration between university and schools, uses mathematical tasks as a basis for developing community in project workshops and for teachers’ design of tasks for classrooms. An aim in the project is that teachers and didacticians, through inquiry into design and use of tasks and reflection on and analysis of their use, will learn more about creating effective learning situations for pupils in mathematics. The processes involved are exemplified through an account of the design and use of the Mirror Task. An activity theory analysis traces the elements of learning of participants, teachers and didacticians, and highlights tensions, their nature and origins, in project activity and that of the established communities of school and university.
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Notes
- 1.
The LCM project was funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) in their programme Kunnskap, Utdanning og Laering (Knowledge, Education and Learning—KUL): Project number 157949/S20.
- 2.
Didacticians are university academics who conduct research in mathematics education (matematikk didaktikk, in Norway) and work with teachers to promote development of mathematics learning and teaching in classrooms. The four authors of this paper were didacticians.
- 3.
Stig Eriksen and Espen Daland were two of these doctoral students and are currently completing theses entitled respectively Mathematical tasks and the building of a learning community of mathematics between teachers and teacher educators and Developing learning communities in mathematics: Exploring issues in a mathematics teaching development and research project.
- 4.
This is a translation from Norwegian, as are other teachers’ words quoted in the text.
- 5.
See Mason (2008) for a discussion of awareness.
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Jaworski, B., Goodchild, S., Eriksen, S., Daland, E. (2011). Mediating Mathematics Teaching Development and Pupils’ Mathematics Learning: The Life Cycle of a Task. In: Zaslavsky, O., Sullivan, P. (eds) Constructing Knowledge for Teaching Secondary Mathematics. Mathematics Teacher Education, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09812-8_9
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