A survey project on professional journals for mathematics teachers

 – an analysis of didactic transposition of institutional knowledge

Speaker:

Yukiko Asami-Johansson, University of Gävle, Sweden

Abstract:

Professional journals for schoolteachers in mathematics are an important arena for disseminating various types of professional knowledge necessary for teaching. The contents of the journals can be about individual teacher’s work for designing lessons, philosophical articles about mathematics education, chronicles of mathematicians, presentation of research results, etc. The selection and editing of such possible contents depend on the needs of the readers—the roles and responsibilities of schoolteachers delegated by a particular institution to which they belong.

In this seminar, I will present a study of how such institutional knowledge is transposed within a professional journal for elementary mathematics teachers in Japan. The analysis using the framework from ATD shows that there are clear tendencies in the articles written by Japanese mathematics teachers, teacher educators and researchers. Many articles focus on transposing noospheric-professional knowledge and didactic knowledge. The former involves shared epistemological knowledge among what we call noospheric profession (e.g. didactians, schoolteachers who constantly study and develop knowledge around teaching of mathematics and working to disseminate those established knowledge within their communities), and the latter involves epistemological knowledge that schoolteachers have employed in their practice to help their students achieve their mathematical goals.

The study is a collaboration with Koji Otaki (Hokkaido University of Education, Japan) and Ryoto Hakamata (Kochi University, Japan).