Instructor: Aki Murata

This course will provide students opportunities to examine some of the key issues in mathematics education research. Mathematics education is a substantial topic, and it has been studied and analyzed in many different ways over the last century. For the current course, we will adopt the comparative and cultural perspectives to examine the teaching-learning practices in U.S. mathematics classrooms.  Through reading, discussion, and final projects, students will experience how U.S. mathematics teaching and learning may be seen as a cultural activity, a reflection of the larger culture. When we identify the aspects of the cultural activity (teaching and learning), reasons and meanings for them, and their places in the system (cultural and educational) as a whole, we are able to start to think of the ways to introduce a change that is culturally sensible. For the students who take this course primarily with teachers’ perspectives, I hope you will find meanings behind what you experience in the classroom and gain a new way to critically think about the practice. For the students who take this course with researchers’ perspectives, I hope you will begin to understand why some aspects of the U.S. teaching-learning culture are resistant to change, and develop new ways to see how different aspects of the culture interact with one another to work as a system. I also hope that the teaching and research perspectives will interact and merge together through the course as we explore the topics.

We will begin this course by examining mathematics education with international and comparative perspectives. We will consider how research literature and international comparative studies frame U.S. mathematics education as a cultural entity, while examining how mathematics is taught in the U.S. and other cultures. Following that, we will investigate how learning is situated in social contexts and how classroom norms and cultures support student learning. Such norms and cultures are established to frame, guide, and constrain certain ways of learning that ground students’ understanding of what is important in learning mathematics. We will then turn to study U.S. classroom examples to highlight how classroom discourse, mathematics communication, and argumentation may be indications of certain classroom cultures and how they also may reflect the larger cultural construct. For the final weeks of the quarter, issues of educational equity and student/teacher learning will be explored. The course will provide multiple reasons for students to critically re-think and re-examine U.S. mathematics education and teaching-learning practices.

Weekly Reaction Papers:

• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7 (no lesson)
• Week 8
• Week 9 (Thanksgiving)
• Week 10

Project:
A research on the use of video-based instruction for the teaching and learning of mathematics. The paper examines existing literature and several projects to highlight the reasons and potential for the use of video in math, and the important issues when designing such instruction.

• Proposal
• Report
• Presentation