Amy Noelle Parks

Overly Scripted: Exploring the Impact of a Scripted Literacy Curriculum on a Preschool Teacher's Instructional Practices in Mathematics

As part of a renewed focus on early childhood mathematics education, researchers have recently called for increased attention to preschool mathematics curricula. This article, which is based on a multiyear ethnographic study in a rural preschool primarily serving African American children, contributes to this area of interest by documenting the instructional practices a teacher learned from her mandated literacy curriculum. This curriculum, which was highly scripted, shaped the teachers instructional practices in mathematics as well as in literacy. The teachers mathematical engagement with children, during formal lessons and informal play, reflected the instructional beliefs of the literacy curriculum, which was demonstrated by a focus on efficiently completing planned tasks, rather than pursuing childrens thinking, and by narrowing mathematics to the use of proper grammar and posing simple questions. This study argues that the curriculums highly structured scripts made it less likely that the teacher would engage in innovative practices in mathematics, which reduced opportunities for children in the classroom to reason and problem solve mathematically. In addition, because of the adoption patterns of scripted curricula, teachers of low-income, minority children are more likely to have their mathematics teaching shaped in this way.

Metaphors of hierarchy in mathematics education discourse: the narrow path

This paper adopts a rhetorical perspective in order to examine language about children in the discourse of mathematics education through a study of metaphor. Previous research has tended to emphasize the notion of ‘beliefs’, which locates responsibility for problematic conceptions of children within the heads of individuals, particularly practising and preservice teachers. Using the notion of metaphor, this paper examines several texts in US mathematics education, including conversations in an elementary classroom, a university mathematics methods classroom, mathematics textbooks, and standards documents. All of these texts draw on the metaphor of children’s learning as travel along a physical path, which supports talking and thinking about children in hierarchical ways. The dominance of this metaphor presents a new challenge for teacher educators concerned with equity: that of examining their own language and practices for hierarchical language.

What Knowledge is Shaping Teacher Preparation in Early Childhood Mathematics

This article examines the bodies of knowledge that influence and inform the teaching of mathematics methods courses for preservice early childhood teachers, focusing on the U.S. context. In particular, the article reports on an analysis of scholarship published over the last 20 years in four journals (two focused on early childhood education and two focused on mathematics education), which examined the discourse in these journals around mathematical content and instructional strategies. The analysis found that attention to the context of early childhood education was minimal, largely as a result of a dominant focus on elementary education. This focus on elementary rather than early childhood showed up in greater attention to advanced content in mathematics and in an emphasis on formal over informal instructional methods. This review suggests a need for research on how preservice teachers learn to teach early mathematics, such as counting and cardinality, to adapt early childhood curricula, to use teaching practices that link formal and informal instruction, and to meet the needs of the whole child while promoting mathematical growth.

Children, Mathematics, and Videotape Using Multimodal Analysis to Bring Bodies Into Early Childhood Assessment Interviews

Despite the increased use of video for data collection, most research using assessment interviews in early childhood education relies solely upon the analysis of linguistic data, ignoring children’s bodies. This trend is particularly troubling in studies of marginalized children because transcripts limited to language can make it difficult to analyze embodied power relations between majority researchers and minority children. This article responds to this problem by outlining a theoretical position on power and bodies, describing multimodal analysis strategies, and using these strategies to analyze the subject positions available during a mathematical assessment interview for three African American preschool child-participants and the European American adult researcher. This study draws attention to the complexity of human interactions during assessment interviews by describing the ways children positioned themselves as willing (or not), attentive (or not), and competent (or not) as well as describing the ways the researcher sought to position herself.

Smart boards, money and the pedagogy of watching

I became seriously interested in Smart Boards the day my daughter brought home an invitation asking me to attend a

Writing about class and race differences and similarities in early childhood mathematics: The case of one monograph

500-per-family dinner at the home of a local minor celebrity. The purpose was to fund the installation of Smart Boards in every classroom at my daughter’s public school. When I emailed the principal to express concern that this sort of invitation might be seen as exclusive, she said that she did not expect that all families could afford to attend, but that enough families would come to allow the school to buy Smart Boards for the last set of classrooms still using traditional white boards. She assured me that all children would benefit from this “fabulous” technology.

What’s More Important: Numbers or Shoes? Readiness, Curriculum, and Nonsense in a Rural Preschool

This article reports on a literature review of 49 articles that cited a single monograph written in 1981 about early learning in mathematics to make claims of similarity or difference across lines of race and class in early mathematics. The review found that while about two-thirds of the articles cited the monograph to make claims of no significant differences across race and class in early mathematics performances (which is the perspective taken by the monograph’s authors in their conclusion and summary), almost one-third of the articles cited the monograph to establish significant social class differences in early mathematics, despite the claims of the monograph’s authors to the contrary. Similarly, a major US government report on early childhood mathematics cited the monograph to establish both race and social class differences. The reasons for and implications of these findings are discussed, including the tendency in recent years to understand race and class in US education primarily in terms of achievement gaps.

Messy learning: Preservice teachers' lesson-study conversations about mathematics and students

One morning during circle time in her preschool classroom, Jakalah turned away from the counting book her teacher was reading to the class and began working on her untied shoes. As she became more engrossed in the task of tying, Jakalah stopped counting along with the class and neglected to respond to the prompts of the teacher. The classroom paraprofessional called Jakalah to the back of the room. “What’s more important?” she asked Jakalah. “Numbers or shoes?” Without hesitation, Jakalah answered: “Shoes!” Seeing the paraprofessiona’s skeptical expression, she quickly amended her answer: “Numbers?” The paraprofessional agreed, saying: “That’s right. Numbers. You need numbers for kindergarten.”