Andreas Ryve

The Culture of the Mathematics Classroom During the First School Years in Finland and Sweden

This chapter elaborates findings from a longitudinal ongoing cross-cultural study comparing the teacher education and classroom practices in Finland and Sweden. The focus is on the cultural scripts of mathematics instruction during the first school years (ages 6–8). Firstly, we present a description of the contexts of each country concerning primary teacher education and the transition from preschool to school. We then characterise the dominating conceptualisations of the mathematics classroom practices for the early years in both countries, building on several analyses of different data sources. We focus especially on the intricate balance between flexibly building mathematics on pupils’ ideas of familiar everyday phenomena within a thematic teaching style on the one hand, and on the other, the organisation of learning environments strictly based on a predetermined hypothetical learning trajectory. Finally, we discuss our findings in light of the international literature on early mathematics education and transition from preschool to school.

Problem solving in Swedish mathematics textbooks for upper secondary school

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to analyse how mathematical problem solving is represented in mathematical textbooks for Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis comprises dominating Swedish textbook series, and relates to uncovering (a) the quantity of tasks that are actually mathematical problems, (b) their location in the chapter, (c) their difficulty level, and (d) their context. Based on an analysis of 5,722 tasks from the area of calculus, it is concluded that the textbooks themselves contain very few tasks that can be defined as mathematical problems, and that those that are mathematical problems are found at the end of a chapter at the most difficult level, and are presented in a pure mathematical context. Implications are discussed.

Curriculum support for teachers' negotiation of meaning : a collective perspective

Acknowledging the central role of teachers in curriculum implementation, a growing body of research has analyzed how curriculum resources can support teachers to learn using these resources well. This has been done mainly with a focus on individual teachers’ learning. Teachers’ daily work encompasses many collaborative aspects around curriculum resources as well, an area too often overlooked. We address this issue by describing and discussing our initial steps in developing an approach to analyze curriculum resources from this collective perspective. The approach combines a social semiotic framework to analyze the meaning potential of curriculum resources and the communities of practice framework to analyze a group of teachers’ negotiation of meaning around these resources.