International Approaches to Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers

Chapter 17: Teacher Development and Curricular Change: A Research Program

213 Chapter 17 Teacher Development and Curricular Change: A Research Program Dario Fiorentini, Rosana G. S. Miskulin, Regina C. Grando, Adair M. Nacarato, Cármen L. B. Passos, and Dione L. Carvalho Investigating the Relationship between Teacher Development and Curricular Change Professional teacher development and renewal of school curriculum have traditionally been treated as independent processes. Generally, curricular innovation and teacher education do not take, as starting and final points, the current school culture, the teaching conditions present in schools, and the complexity of pedagogical work in mathematics. In our opinion, this is the main reason why curricular reforms have not been able to achieve the expected transformations. The studies developed by our research group GEPFPM1 in past years in collaborative groups (gathering, in each group, professionals with different knowledge) showed that teachers’ collective reflections on their practice had contributed to transforming the teachers into professionals (1) who are more critical of or reflective on their work, their knowledge , their students, and themselves; (2) who transform their practices with autonomy and conscientiousness; (3) and who produce knowledge in their professional field (Fiorentini, Freitas, Miskulin, Nacarato, & Grando, 2004; Fiorentini et al., 2005). 214 || Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers Teachers in Investigative Communities: Some Assumptions The results of these researches led us to conceive teaching not only as a simple practice but also as a praxis in which theory and action are interwoven because teachers reflect and theorize all the time, negotiating possibilities between their classrooms and their lives in school and between their daily work with students and a larger movement of change and social equality. We projected, then, a way to promote the development of teaching practices and teachers’ knowledge as well as an increase in their investigative communities. This seems to find an echo in Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, p. 292): “Constructing local knowledge is understood to be a process of building, interrogating, elaborating, and critiquing conceptual frameworks that link action and problem posing to the immediate context, as well as to larger social, cultural and political issues.” The collaboration among different professionals can help to construct teachers’ identity and professional autonomy in order to become critical users of knowledge elaborated by others (Carr & Kemmis, 1987). Our professional and research trajectory in Brazil has been devoted to articulating the problems and challenges of teacher education and the development of school curriculum. This has brought us to the conviction that university researchers, school teachers, and future teachers can learn together how to deal with school diversity toward a possible education of quality for the great contingent of less privileged students. So a possible education of quality, for each reality, is a collective construction and requires another conception of pedagogical work, of teacher development, and therefore of research. In this conception, university teacher educators, school teachers, and future teachers constitute a community of learning and investigation in which the school teachers bring problems and challenges from their school practices and in which the teacher educators and future teachers act in response to the school teachers’ demands. In this community, all the participants study, problematize, reflect, and investigate the complexity of mathematical school practices and negotiate possible changes in school curriculum (see Figure 17.1). This problematization of the interrelation between teacher education and curricular change, in the current context, leads us, first, to assume anthropological conceptions of the introduction of “an extended vision of the possible content knowledge that must be included, explicitly, in the curricula, Teacher Development and Curricular Change || 215 Figure 17.1 Community of learning and inquiring Future Teachers They together study, problematize, reflect and inquire on the complexity of math-school practices and also negotiate the possible changes of curriculum Teacher educators They act in function of demands of school teachers They bring problems and challenges from school practices School teachers beyond the content knowledge which is considered academically relevant” (Gimeno, 1999, p. 174). Second, it leads us to assume a political and epistemological stance that consists of recognizing and taking account of the capacity of the teachers’ community to promote professional knowledge, curricular change, and teacher development in collaborative and investigative ways. This second aspect focuses, as a starting point, on the problems and challenges of educational practices in schools. However, this is a complex social process with multiple expressions and dynamics which constructs itself over time and under certain conditions. Our main research hypothesis is therefore to conceive of school and particularly...