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Conceptions of teaching and justice as pivotal to mathematics teacher educators’ thinking about mathematical knowledge for teaching

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Abstract

Recent scholarship has explored mathematical demands faced by mathematics teacher educators and ways to support their development, but little attention has been given to the basic question of how mathematics teacher educators think about content knowledge for teaching. Knowing what they think could inform efforts to support them. Our analysis reveals that some think about mathematical knowledge for teaching as an independent, abstracted resource to be taught and learned in relative isolation from teaching, while others think about it as dynamic, situated work. We argue that this key difference matters for how they work with teachers. Further, our analysis reveals that their thinking about both teaching and justice interacts with their thinking about mathematical knowledge for teaching and that their thinking in these other two domains can be a resource for supporting their mathematical development.

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Notes

  1. We use the phrase “mathematical knowledge for teaching” and its acronym to refer broadly to knowledge important for teaching.

  2. Specialized content knowledge (SCK) is a domain of MKT characterized by Ball et al. (2008) and often used at the workshop.

  3. We acknowledge that this statement and others in this section may be experienced by readers as emotionally charged or disparaging; however, we understand this statement to be descriptive—using concepts from the literature to describe the data. Many scholars suggest that defensiveness is to be expected.

  4. For an indicator of thinking about mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT), we converted raw counts for the resource-based and practice-based codes to scales from 0 to 3, made the resource-based scale negative, and added the two scales. To generate an indicator for thinking about teaching (Teaching), we negated scaled Teaching-as-Straightforward and Teaching-as-Math-and-Student-Thinking counts and added the scaled Teaching-as-Mutual counts. To generate an indicator of thinking (Justice), we negated the scaled Topical/optional counts and added the scaled Fundamental/pervasive counts. As we combined counts and scales, we standardized at each step.

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Funding

This article is based on work supported by the US National Science Foundation (grant numbers 1502778 and 1760788).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan School of Education, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Mark Hoover & Matthew Dahlgren

  2. Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Reidar Mosvold

  3. School of Education, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Imani Goffney

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  1. Mark Hoover
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  2. Matthew Dahlgren
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  4. Imani Goffney
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See Figs.

Fig. 8
figure 8

A snapshot of analysis of less-developed and/or problematic views evident in MTEs’ thinking about justice (whether intentional or unintentional), with themes (in bold), brief descriptions, intermediate labels of code instances (in dashed rectangles), and example quotes (in speech bubbles)

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Fig. 9
figure 9

A snapshot of analysis of more-developed and/or constructive views evident in MTEs’ thinking about justice, with themes (in bold), brief descriptions, intermediate labels of code instances (in dashed rectangles), and example quotes (in speech bubbles)

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9.

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Hoover, M., Dahlgren, M., Mosvold, R. et al. Conceptions of teaching and justice as pivotal to mathematics teacher educators’ thinking about mathematical knowledge for teaching. J Math Teacher Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-023-09609-z

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