International Approaches to Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers

Chapter 15: Investigating and Writing in the Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers

194 Chapter 15 Investigating and Writing in the Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers Maria Teresa Menezes Freitas and Dario Fiorentini Introduction This chapter describes and analyzes the roles and contributions of both investigation and discursive writing in mathematics teacher education. After theoretically discussing this perspective in teachers’ education, we describe the narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which represents a methodological alternative to investigating the teachers’ education process. We also present a narrative describing the personal and professional development of a student teacher who was observed over approximately three years, the period during which he became a teacher. In this chapter, we take into account two studies, both developed at Unicamp (Fiorentini, 2004; Freitas, 2006). The last one concerns the domain of plane geometry and geometrical constructions, under the responsibility of the Department of Mathematics in the Mathematics , Statistics, and Scientific Computing Institute and focused on the mathematical content knowledge of the future teacher. The first study is related to the subject of mathematics teaching practice and teachers’ supervised training (teaching practice) developed under the responsibility of the Department of Teaching Methodology of the Faculty of Education. Investigating and Writing in Professional Development || 195 Investigation and Writing in Teacher Education Didactical-pedagogical subjects have been studied due to their educative potential, using discursive writing and investigation, especially when these procedures are used and when we explore written discursive language registers of teacher learners (Fiorentini, 2004; Freitas, 2000). Mathematics teacher education courses still maintain a teaching practice that values orality, explanation, repetition in long lists of exercises, and distribution of a systematic, formalized, and already built knowledge. Thus, the student doesn’t reach this knowledge by doing explorations, inquiries, or readings. When writing appears in this context, it is usually technical and formal and it does not problematize the mathematical knowledge. This way of using and exploring writing in mathematics teachers’ education does not contribute to professional development of teachers. Faced with this problem, we were motivated to find out what happens during pre-service teachers’ education when mathematics subjects also begin to privilege a process of reflective writing. Our proposal was to show that the intentional exploration of reading, researching, and writing in the process of teaching and learning mathematics is a potential way to expand future teachers ’ ability to understand and reflect on mathematical activity in the classroom , promoting in this way their personal and professional development. According to Larrosa (1999), during the education process, the most important issue is not what the student learns but the intimate relationship that he establishes with the subject studied. In that sense, when the student deepens his studies, using themes in which he is interested and that respond to his expectations and possibilities, he is not reduced to a simple object of education. He becomes, at the same time, a product and an agent of his history and his own process of intellectual and human development (Fiorentini, 2004). This conception of education, as well as the concept of experience in Fontana (2002) and Larrosa (1998), help us to improve the mathematics teaching processes that privilege the technical and formal reading-writing in mathematics to promote other ways of establishing relationships with mathematical knowledge: that is, this conception promotes knowledge and meaning provided by the teacher. Based on this conception, to obtain a genuine formative experience, mathematics teaching should consider an exploratory, communicative, and intersubjective practice, privileging the search for knowledge and the production of meaning about what is learned and taught. 196 || Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers Considering the possibility of research and discursive writing’s contribution to a mathematics teachers’ education course, we put ourselves in a position of curious investigators who tried to understand the educative potentialities that can be reached by the use of various communicative tools, especially writing. The Practice of Investigating and Writing in the Courses On the one hand, in the teaching practice course at Unicamp, the investigating and writing activities concerned, first, the pedagogical practice of the teacher educator (generally an experienced teacher who collaborates as a tutor or supervisor in the teachers’ education program) and, second, the initial teaching practice of the student teacher. A day-to-day school study in this environment was carried out by pairs of students and developed by ethnographic observations in classes—registered in diaries—that were read, analyzed, and discussed by them and their colleagues (specialized in teaching practice). On the other hand, the proposal of the...