The reform of mathematics education requires the teacher to support individual students’ learning, while orchestrating classroom communication to develop taken-as-shared mathematical concepts and practices. This moves the teacher to centre stage of curriculum enactment, a situation I phrased as one of forced autonomy. The aim was to understand how novice teachers cope with this.
The research questions were whether and how their school mathematics images (SMIs) corresponded to those of the reform and, if so, whether and how that was reflected in classroom interaction.
I addressed the first question in a quantitative study of participants’ SMIs; the second in a multiple case study of selected teachers inspired by the reform. Through an open coding of the questionnaires, I found five categories of SMIs with different combinations of process-product emphases on the content and different perspectives on teaching-learning processes, sometimes linked with concerns for the democratic potentials of school mathematics.
To answer the second question, I conducted analyses of practices in the participants’ classrooms in view their SMIs and of dominant school cultures, leading to nuanced descriptions of the relationships between SMIs and classroom interaction.
Importantly, the study challenged other approaches to studying what is often called 'teachers’ beliefs'.
Danmark. Spørgeskema til ca 120 nyuddannede matematiklærere og interviews og observationer med med tre (egentlig fire, men den sidste blev syg under forløbet og er ikke beskrevet i afhandlingen)