Revisiting School Mathematics in Pre-service Secondary Teacher Education: Purposes, Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Despite compelling arguments for the importance of revisiting school mathematics in pre-service mathematics teacher education, there is little indication of how such revisiting might be done, particularly at secondary level. We argue that revisiting provides three key opportunities for learning: (1) additional time on the mathematics that pre-service teachers will teach in schools; (2) attention to mathematical practices and (3) opportunity to learn about seminal constructs and findings from the mathematics education research literature. We illustrate these with three revisiting tasks and their enactment in a course where opportunities for revisiting were deliberately offered. We also discuss challenges that arise as teacher educators intentionally design opportunities for revisiting school mathematics.