Jeppe Skott

Towards a Participatory Approach to ‘Beliefs’ in Mathematics Education

Over the last three decades research in beliefs, and affect more generally, has developed into a significant field of study. It attempts to make sense of teachers’ and students’ understandings of m ...

Re-centring the Individual in Participatory Accounts of Professional Identity

Studies of professional identity are generally conducted using participatory frameworks and from the perspective of a particular development initiative. They provide understandings of teachers’ move towards more comprehensive participation in the practices the initiative promotes. Studies in line with this main trend, however, leave questions of teacher identity unanswered when teachers are not enrolled in long-term development programmes. I argue that to address such questions a different framework is needed, one that maintains the participatory stance, but focuses on the individual teacher rather than a development initiative. It is the intention of the Patterns-of-Participation framework (PoP) that I introduce to re-centre the individual in this sense. To make my point, I discuss how research frameworks may be conceptualized and compared and use the resulting “frameworks framework” to contrast studies of the main trend with the intentions of PoP.

Prospective Teachers’ Approach to Reasoning and Proof: Affective and Cognitive Issues

Reasoning and proof (R&P) are key elements in current reform efforts, but notorious for the problems they create for teachers. We present results from a pilot to an intervention study that seeks to alleviate these problems for prospective primary and lower secondary teachers in Denmark. The study introduces R&P in contexts that are “sufficiently close” to both academic mathematics and to instruction in school. The pilot asks, if this is a feasible approach. The part of the pilot presented here consists of responses by 57 prospective teachers to a qualitative questionnaire. The results show that many feel strongly about R&P, one way or another, but also that they have considerable problems with these processes to some extent irrespectively of their affective commitment. The results of the pilot confirm our approach for the main study.

Patterns of Participation

Approaches to learning in educational scholarship may be characterised in terms of their affinity with two broad metaphors, those of learning as acquisition and learning as participation (Lave, 1997; Sfard, 2003, 2008). The relationships between and among frameworks in line with one or the other of these metaphors have been widely discussed in the literature, but less so in relation to teachers than to students.

Book review : "Key works in radical constructivism" by Ernst von Glasersfeld and edited by Marie Larochelle

Books Reviewed: Nick Johnstone and Libby Wood, Private Firms and Public Water: Realizing Social and Environmental Objectives in Developing Countries, David Orden, Robert Paarlberg and Terry Roe, Policy Reform in American Agriculture: Analysis and Prognosis S.R. Harrison, J.L. Herbohn, and K.F. Herbohn, Sustainable Small-scale Forestry: Socio-economic Analysis and Policy Sebastian Killinger, International Environmental Externalities and the Double Dividend J.M. Antle and V.H. Smith, The Economics of World Wheat Markets Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World Arun Agrawal and Clark C. Gibson, Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender, and the State in Community-based Conservation R. Quentin Grafton, Linwood H. Pendleton and Harry W. Nelson, A Dictionary of Environmental Economics, Science and Policy