Norms of Practices in Pre-service teacher Education Multilingual Classrooms: Implications for Teacher Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: The role of language in teachers' and learners' understanding of early grades math

Proposal

Mathematics is a social activity (Cobbs and McClain, 1999). Norms are regularities that guide social interactions. Mathematical practices, it can be argued, are concerned with the dynamics of the learning process while the norms of practice are concerned with the dynamics of the discourse process. Hence, norms of practice are concerned with the patterns and rules of engagement that contribute to the stability of the mathematics discourse and the community of practice. The norms of a classroom community, whether implicit or explicit, influence the discourse pattern of the classroom by way of who speaks when and for what reasons, and whether the interaction is dialogic or authoritative or a combination of both. As Guven and Dede (2017) argues, norms of practice are what differentiates one mathematics classroom from another classroom. There has been a lot of research focusing on mathematical practices but only limited focusing on norms of practices in teacher education mathematics classrooms. Yet, one of the key findings from the current study is that norms of practices can greatly influence what mathematics is taught or learned in pre-service teacher education multilingual classrooms. The questions that informed this study was: What norms of practice are in use in multilingual mathematics classrooms of pre-service teachers and how do these norms co-construct the mathematics pre-service teacher education classrooms?
The wider study for this research consisted of a sample of four universities in one province in South Africa. For the study reported in this paper, one teacher educator was selected from each of two of these universities, which I call University A and University B. The two universities were chosen because they present contrasting contexts of pre-service teacher education. English is an additional language for the majority of pre-service teachers and teacher educators at University A. At University B, the pre-service teachers come from a range of linguistic backgrounds, while a good number of the teacher educators have English as their first language. I have called the teacher educator from University A, Mbali and from University B, Esther.
For the purpose of the present study, I use three categorisations to describe emergent norms in the pre-service teacher education classroom communities of practice: conversational norms, conceptual norms and interpersonal norms (Essien, 2016). Conversational norms are norms that guide interaction in the class and do not relate directly to the content of the mathematics at stake. Example include taking turns to speak; speak-out norm. Conceptual norms are norms that relate directly to the mathematical object under discussion. Examples are Justification norm; mathematics justification norm; consensus norm; non-ambiguity norm. Interpersonal norms are norms that relate to conversational norms, but in this particular case, these are norms that guide the interpersonal relations in the class. An example would be the avoidance of threat norm where one is expected not to ridicule the answer of another community member. These three categorisations were recontextualised from literature dealing with norms of practice and at the same time, guided by my data. Hence the norms of practice in use were also developed both a priori and a posteriori. The aim of the study was not to examine how the norms were communally constituted, but to delineate the norms that were present in the class in order to make sense of how certain characteristics of the teacher education classroom communities of practice and regularities in classroom activities are influenced by the social context of the community and how, in turn, they influence the dynamics of teaching and learning in multilingual pre-service teacher education classrooms.
Finding from the study revealed that it was not in the naming of the different mathematical practices present in the multilingual classrooms that the researcher saw differences between the teacher education classroom communities but in examining how these practices shape and are shaped by the norms of practice present in the two different classrooms. The study revealed that the two CoPs opened up different possibilities for the pre-service teachers as far as preparing for teaching mathematics is concerned. For Mbali (Uninversity A), due to the types of norms constituted in her class, there was limited interanimation of ideas around the mathematical concepts which meant that the pre-service teachers had limited opportunity to develop knowledge of how to make use of contributions in class to further the mathematical development of concepts. It also meant that the pre-service teachers had limited opportunities for engaging in extended discussions around mathematical concepts. As result, Mbali’s classroom largely focused on procedures for arriving at the correct answer or what Robertson and Graven refer to as ‘right answerism’. On the other hand, due to the type of norms constituted in University B, Esther facilitated the co-construction of knowledge while at the same time providing the community with opportunities for the development of mathematical discourse.
Students in multilingual classrooms who do mathematics in a language which is not their first or home language need opportunities to engage in extended interactions in the classroom that allow them to use the second language (LoLT), to manipulate it, and to hear from others how the discourse, especially the academic language in mathematics, is used (Krashen, 1982). An important contributing factor to the norms in Esther’s class was the concern of creating an environment of trust in the classrooms (Essien, 2010). In South Africa where mother-tongue education was used as a tool for suppression and where English was synonymous with superiority, power and whiteness, and fluency in English was perceived as an “emblem of educatedness”, the issue of creating or building trust between monolingual and multilingual teacher educators and their pre-service teachers, and of creating an environment where pre-service teachers feel comfortable and are given the opportunity to speak English without fear of ridicule or criticism, was important for the teacher educators in University B more than in University A.

Author

• Anthony A. Essien, University of the Witwatersrand