The mediating role of a minority ethnic teacher's past experiences as a tool for understanding mathematical learning and teaching

Crafter, Sarah and De Abreu, Guida (2010). The mediating role of a minority ethnic teacher's past experiences as a tool for understanding mathematical learning and teaching. In: European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) Special Interest Group 21: Learning and Teaching in Culturally Diverse Settings: Moving through cultures of learning, 2-3 Sep 2010, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Abstract

This paper will examine how a teacher's past experiences, alongside experiences of the present and future, play a mediating role in understanding home and school mathematics learning and teaching. The sociocultural approach will form the basis for the introduction of two key theoretical concepts which are i) heterochronicity, which looks at the way meaning is generated over time in the overlapping histories of the individual and society and ii) prolepsis, where the notion of future mediates with the past and present. As such, the movement through cultures of learning are temporal and spatial. The analysis will draw on a case study exemplar of a minority ethnic teacher (Pakistani Kashmiri) working in a school which was mostly made up of South Asian pupils (Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi) in the Southeast of England. The findings will shed light on how she interweaves her own experience of growing up in the English school system with herself as a school teacher, herself as a mother and her understandings of the parents in the school. Thus, her own past experiences of mathematics learning are embedded at the level of the individual, the family and the wider community. Perhaps more importantly, this paper will address how her general understandings of the wider community have a powerful influence on her representations of the mathematical.

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