Understanding mathematics education through teachers’ perspectives

Abstract

Mathematics teachers have been studied in a variety of ways that include investigating their knowledge, beliefs, conceptions, identity, learning, change, and teaching. Some of these studies have enabled us to understand mathematics education and implications for teacher education and professional development through teachers’ perspectives. These perspectives tend to be practice based and deal with practical knowledge (Fenstermacher 1994), that is, knowledge that arises out of action and experience in the classroom. This knowledge, for example, relates to knowing the right place and time to do things or how to see and interpret events related to one’s actions, including adapting to situations in the classroom, shaping situations in the classroom, and making selections when choices are available. Given the growing complexity of classroom contexts and expectations for more meaningful teaching of mathematics, ongoing focus on the teachers’ perspectives in research is important to broaden and deepen our understanding of mathematics and teacher education based on lived experiences. The studies in this issue of the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education contribute to this focus in some important ways. In particular, in the context of teaching mathematics, they include a focus on teacher thinking of authority in the classroom, teacher decision making, teacher noticing, and teacher views of themselves as engaging in reform-based practices. David Wagner and Beth Herbel-Eisenmann investigated how mathematics teachers tend to think about authority in their classrooms, in particular, the sources of authority and how the teachers related these sources to each other. They developed a tool involving the use of a diagram to access teachers’ thinking about authority in their classrooms. The diagrams generated by the teachers in the study described how they saw authority at work in their classrooms, that is, from their perspectives as participants in the classroom discourse. The study highlights various perspectives the teachers worked from when thinking about authority in their classrooms. It illustrates the importance of understanding teachers’ perspectives about authority and suggests the need for more research to help us to further understand authority in the mathematics classroom from the teacher’s perspective.