Wee Tiong Seah

Values in Mathematics Teaching — The Hidden Persuaders?

Values are at the heart of teaching any subject, but are rarely explicitly addressed in the mathematics teaching literature. In particular, research on values in mathematics education is sadly neglected. This chapter addresses these gaps by drawing together the various research and theoretical fields that bear upon the values dimension of mathematics education. It begins with a theoretical reflection on the distinctions between values, beliefs and attitudes, and continues with reviewing the literature relating teachers’ values to their decisions and actions in the classroom. Moving to the limited research on values in mathematics education, there is discussion of values in the increasingly researched area of socio-cultural aspects of mathematics education. The second half of the chapter is devoted to issues regarding research approaches to studying values in our field, and presents two projects, one based in Monash University, Australia and the other at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. The first project focused on the relationship between teachers’ intended and implemented values, and the second explored teachers’ values as constituting their pedagogical identities. Implications of this research for teachers’ professional development are drawn, and the chapter finishes by outlining the research difficulties inherent in this area, and offers a set of challenges designed to carry the research agenda forward.

Flying in, Flying Out: Offshore Teaching in Higher Education

This paper discusses the relatively new phenomenon of university education faculties offering offshore education. The analogy, ‘flying in, flying out’ captures the intensity of such offshore experiences for visiting academics, and contrasts their professional experiences against expatriate academics. This paper reports on case studies of two academics from different parts of Australia with different research and teaching experiences, observing how they perceived cultural value differences relating to content, pedagogy and education, and how they negotiated the dissonance which resulted. While both participants identified areas for ongoing fine tuning at the institutional level, both felt that the offshore teaching experience had helped them to expand their global outlooks and facilitate a more internationalised curriculum planning and delivery.

Mathematics Education and Student Values: The Cultivation of Mathematical Wellbeing

This chapter argues that school mathematics involves more than just the “performance” of students and that “working mathematically” means far more than being good at a specified set of skills, as well as more than being able to show mastery of various conceptual structures. It suggests that experienced teachers understand that the wellbeing of many students can diminish when they are asked to engage with mathematics learning. Underlying such engagement and hence mathematical performance is a command of a specific language that holds the conceptualizing process together. Moreover, of particular importance for this chapter are the values, and their language, that are embedded within mathematics and its pedagogy and how they can be invoked to enable better engagement, improved student wellbeing and consequently better performance.

Valuing Diversity in Mathematics Pedagogy Through the Volitional Nature and Alignment of Values

More than ever before, teachers need to value the cultural diversity amongst their students and to value the diversity of mathematical ideas their students bring with them to class. In this chapter, we emphasise the need for the valuing of diversity in ways which are inclusive and empowering to both teachers and their students. Yet, this is not about embracing the diverse perspectives and ideas all at the same time. Given the volitional nature of values and valuing, we acknowledge that mathematics classroom interactions represent sites of contestation and conflicts. We draw on available data to illustrate how teachers can value diversity meaningfully through a process called values alignment. Strategies include the harnessing of mutually held values as well as the re-prioritising of one’s own values.

Improving Mathematics Pedagogy Through Student/Teacher Valuing: Lessons from Five Continents

This chapter focuses on the construct of values/valuing, using the findings of the large-scale, ‘What I Find Important (in mathematics learning)’ [WIFI] study to explore how values/valuing promotes effective (mathematics) pedagogy. The analysis of some 16,000 questionnaires collected from 19 economies reveals the absence of any relationship between values and specific actions, suggesting that the actions that reflect what are being valued are culturally-dependent. Students in economies which perform well in the PISA assessments were also found to value connections, understanding, communication, and recall in their mathematics learning, whereas their peers at the other end of the league table appeared to value relevance and practice more. The notion of intrinsic and extrinsic valuing will be discussed. In acknowledging the presence of value differences and conflicts that arise from inter-personal interactions in mathematics lessons, teachers’ capacity to engage with values alignment is highlighted.

Connections Between Valuing and Values: Exploring Experiences and Rethinking Data Generating Methods

What do teacher colleagues learn when they read our research? What would teacher colleagues find if they looked at some of our research in a different way? Do our teacher friends wonder what it might be like to teach values that they are not sure of? Do our research colleagues wonder whether role play could be a set of new methods we could use in the future that might help in this area? One possibility for teachers we think is using role-playing as a way of building new experiences and for researchers as a potentially different type of data-generating context. Hence in this Discussion Group we explore values and valuing, and then perform and evaluate a role-play to this end. At the core of this context is experiencing what it is like to act out a given valuing role, or observing players who do so, and ascertaining whether identifiable behaviours are more likely to be associated with specific values. We will explore the experiences of the different ‘players’ and wonder whether such an approach will be useful for both teachers and researchers in coming to understand more deeply what it feels like to experience valuing a given value, and deciphering what behaviours point to particular values.

The WIFI Study: Students’ Valuing of Mathematics Learning in Hong Kong and Japan

This chapter introduces the reader to the What I Find Important (in my mathematics learning) study (WIFI), conducted by a consortium of 21 research teams from 18 economies. It uses the same questionnaire to assess what students value in their respective mathematics education experiences. Two case economies, Hong Kong and Japan, provide the context for the discussion. This provides a reference point for analyzing four significant themes: the affordance to identify and define cultures and subcultures, the documenting and comparing of espoused and enacted valuing, the triangulation of survey responses, and the culturally situated labelling of values and valuing.

Investigating teachers’ appraisal of unexpected moments and underlying values: an exploratory case in the context of changing mathematics classroom discourse

This article provides an exploratory case study that examines what one teacher indicated as unexpected as she worked to become more purposeful about her classroom discourse practices. We found that she highlighted three areas as being unexpected: (1) aspects of lesson enactment; (2) characteristics of student learning and (3) her own intentionality or purposefulness. We interpret these instances through the lens of the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) appraisal framework in order to understand how she evaluates the instances she highlights and connect these instances to the literature on values in the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Learners’ Preferred Mathematical Task Types: The Values Perspective

Through the interpretation of a set of data from a research study that investigated grade 5 and 6 students’ preferences among three types of mathematical tasks, this chapter presents an alternative way in which data might be interpreted. While it was found that across the areas of number and geometry, the three types of tasks were most preferred across different geographical locations, the values perspective demonstrated a remarkably consistent valuing of ‘challenge’, ‘easiness’ and ‘real life scenario’. It is proposed that this ‘rethinking’ into the way in which collected data might be analysed from the values perspective can potentially enrich our understanding of how we can better facilitate mathematics learning and teaching in schools.

Reflections on the MERGA research review 2004-2007

The tradition of the MERGA four-year review provides evidence of sustained and evolving research within the Australasian mathematics education community. As part of the editing team for the previous review (Forgasz et al., 2008) we appreciate the opportunity to reflect on that review and to provide some personal insights into recent developments.