Ingo Witzke

Making Domain-Specific Beliefs Explicit for Prospective Teachers

The implicit effects of using history of mathematics in teachers’ education on the individual beliefs of prospective mathematics teachers are widely discussed. However historical texts may also play an important role in making different mathematical worldviews and domain-specific beliefs explicit, as we discuss in this chapter. For this purpose, after sketching some connecting points between the history of mathematics on the one hand and individual beliefs of mathematics on the other and the short presentation of results of an empirical study on domain-specific beliefs of school calculus, we present an example from prospective teachers’ education at the University of Siegen: Within a course on subject matter didactics of calculus a historical source is used to initiate discussions on students’ beliefs.

Addressing the Transition from School to University

Beginning in 2015 we designed and taught an intensive seminar, which addressed the transition from school to university by making students aware of concept changes in the history of geometry. This paper focuses on the design of a pilot study and its development into a semester-long seminar. We use the case of one participant, Inga, to highlight the data and results emerging from the pilot seminar. Inga’s case indicated that the seminar raised explicit awareness of the transition from school to university mathematics and was worth expanding into a semester-long seminar. Additionally, students’ experiences in this seminar can also support their transition back to school from university as teachers, paving the way for teacher students to overcome Klein’s well-known double discontinuity.

Forschend lernen zu lehren - ein Projekt zur Gestaltung der neu geschaffenen Praxisphase in NRW

Ziel des mit dem Wintersemester 2013/14 gestarteten Projektes ist es, ein Format zu entwickeln und zu erproben, das eine optimale Vorbereitung und Begleitung der Studierenden im (Master-) Lehramtsstudium während der neu geschaffenen Praxisphase in NRW (Beginn: WS 2015/16) ermöglicht. Das Projekt wird im Rahmen der „Innovation in der Lehre“ an der Universität zu Köln durch Qualitätsverbesserungsmittel für die Dauer von 4 Semestern unterstützt.