Multimedia Narratives as Windows Into Teachers' Perspectives on Pedagogy

• In Event: Cyber-Enabled Research That Repurposes a Major Video Collection on Students' Mathematical Reasoning

Abstract

Video is an important resource for instruction and research as it can capture complex situations better than other methods (e.g., field notes) and it can provide a rich context for discussion. One benefit of video is that it is open to multiple interpretations, as one can watch the same video interaction through a different lens and context and create their own interpretation of the situation (Miller & Zhou, 2007). Through constructing video multimedia artifacts, the users are bringing a particular lens within a specific context into their analysis. When they create these multimedia artifacts using the RUanalytic by selecting and editing particular videos from the VMC, they are producing new data (Goldman & McDermott, 2007). The videos chosen, edited, annotated, and sequenced by a user can offer insights into his or her perspective.

This study will report on the various lenses that pre and in-service teachers [n1 (pre-service) = 11, n2 (in-service) = 29] used to construct their RUanalytics over three iterations of a graduate level Mathematics Education course at a large Northeastern University that focused on student reasoning in working on combinatorics problems. The pre-service teachers were in their first semester of a four-semester teacher preparation program and the in-service teachers had at least five years of experience in middle or high school. The course used a modified lesson study approach (Authors, 2011) in which participants engaged in open-ended problem-solving tasks in groups and shared their solutions with the entire class; they watched and discussed videos of school-aged children engaging in the same tasks; and they read and discussed empirical and theoretical papers related to mathematics education. As a final project, the participants constructed a RUanalytic about learning/teaching mathematics. Analysis was then conducted to investigate the following: the lens used for their RUanalytics, the math strands and grade levels of the learners, and the video clips used to support their narratives.

Resulting RUanalytics spanned multiple topics. Four main categories of topics that were prevalent related to: (1) how students reason, both correctly and incorrectly, about a mathematics problem; (2) teacher pedagogy including questioning; (3) peer interactions; and (4) the overall learning environment (i.e., how problem-solving sessions were structured). There was no significant difference in the topics chosen across each iteration of the course. However, there were interesting differences in topics selected between pre and in-service teachers. The in-service teachers created narratives for their RUanalytics that focused on student behaviors in their video choices and examined how the students build understanding of a mathematics topic (e.g., development of part-whole relationship in fraction), in contrast to narratives developed by pre-service teachers who focused more on pedagogy (e.g., teacher moves, teacher questioning, the creation of the classroom environment). In considering these outcomes, perspectives chosen by the pre-service teachers seem to reflect their imminent concerns about pedagogy with transitioning to the new role of classroom teacher, whereas in-service teachers have the foundation of their prior experiences to focus on the details of students' learning as a primary aspect of pedagogy.

Author

• Robert Sigley, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway