Prospective Teachers' Design Decisions, Rationales, and Resources: Re/claiming Teacher Agency Through Mathematical Making

• In Event: Perceptions, Procedures, and Prospective Teachers: STEM Teacher Education

Abstract

Positioning teachers as designers of their own curricular resources invites opportunities for their explorations of innovation at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and design. As researchers accepting greater responsibility for the preparation of teachers for work in diverse contexts, our work explores structures of teacher preparation that cultivate the imagination of more humanistic forms of mathematics teaching and learning by supporting such explorations. This paper reports on an investigation into the nature of prospective teachers’ design activity as they were tasked with the Making of mathematical manipulatives. We share findings from the analysis of this activity that convey the diversity of design decisions, rationales, and mediating resources that it entailed. The implications of these findings for teacher preparation are considered.

Authors

• Denish Ogweno Akuom, Montclair State University

• Steven Greenstein, Montclair State University