Learning about teaching argumentation for critical mathematics education in multilingual classrooms

In the project, we investigated the two compulsory mathematics courses in teacher education for teachers of Grade 1-7, across five years. The aim was to gain insights into what supports or hinders preservice teachers (PTs) in learning to teach Argumentation for Critical Mathematics Education (ACME) to school students in multilingual classrooms through modelling and ICT. The results show several tensions in supporting PTs to learn about teaching ACME in multilingual classrooms. Our response to these tensions illustrates how they sometimes supported and sometimes hindered preservice teachers to learn about teaching ACME. One tension was mathematics teacher educators and PTs’ uncomfortableness about uncertainty. Although working through uncomfortableness can lead some PTs to try out and be successful with their teaching on practicum, it can also lead to teacher educators and PTs being resistant to incorporating new ideas. A second related tension was about “what is enough” regarding how much of each of the five key aspects of the project—argumentation, critical mathematics education, modelling, ICT and multilingual classrooms—should be presented to PTs. When too much was expected, the PTs resisted engaging with learning opportunities, or teacher educators resisted including topics or aspects of topics. When too little was expected of PTs, then opportunities for learning about new approaches to ACME were reduced. A third tension was about how teacher educators could meet both short-term and long-term professional needs of PTs. This tension often involved considerations about how to combine the different aspects of the project, and often left the teacher educator focussing on the short term needs for practicum. A final tension was about ownership of ideas or teaching practices, i.e., how to introduce new ideas but ensure that the group, PTs or teacher educations, who were to take on those ideas, also gained ownership of those ideas.

We have achieved many of the outcomes and impacts that we had proposed in the project application. We present the main ones in the list below: * Help to strengthen the research-based foundation for teacher education -provide relevant articles for the literature lists for our courses, which were based on Norwegian mathematics classroom data -PhD candidates will complete in 2023 -development of tasks to be used in teacher education based on research work -4 people have been upgraded to første competence -1 person has been upgraded to professsor * Enhance the quality of the services and the capacity to meet the current and future needs for expertise over a teaching career -GLU1-7 compulsory mathematics course have been adjusted related to research outcomes -The research outcomes have affected other teacher education course, especially the 4th and 5th years of the Master courses * Develop strong academic groups nationally -researchers from LATACME have presented regularly at the Norwegian mathematics teacher education conference in 2018, 2019 and 2021 (2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic). * Have a plan for knowledge-sharing and dissemination activities -in November 2021, we ran a teacher conference for teachers in the local region. -in November 2022, we ran an international symposium over three days in which we presented results from LATACME -LATACME researchers have also been presenting at international research conferences (for example, CERME, NORMA, NOFA8, MES) -we have published many conference papers, journal articles and book chapters * Have plans for national cooperation -involvement in a joint project with researchers as University College in Østfold and University in Tromsø (The Artic University)

This project will develop the compulsory mathematics education courses in the teacher education programmes for the first seven years of school (GLU1-7) at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. The ultimate aim is for mathematics teaching in Norway's many multilingual classrooms to become more relevant and useful for students. Improving preservice teachers (PTs') competency in teaching argumentation for critical mathematics education (ACME) through planning, implementing and evaluating sets of lessons in university and school settings will increase their future students' understandings about how mathematics can be used to promote and critique solutions to problems facing democratic societies, both now and in the future. To understand how mathematics teacher education courses can be improved, our research aim is to identify what supports and hinders PTs' learning about how to teach ACME in multilingual classrooms. To investigate what supports and hinders PTs' learning about teaching ACME, we focus on three contextual features: argumentation and language diversity; argumentation and mathematical modelling; and argumentation and ICT. The three foci provide opportunities to investigate how PTs deal with different kinds of contextual features when teaching ACME. Multilingual classrooms requires PTs to adapt their teaching to the needs to the students. Modelling requires PTs to integrate content and pedagogy when planning and implementing lessons. ICT requires PTs to consider how digital artefacts mediate students' learning about ACME. Three sub-projects (SPs), based on these foci, will run simultaneously across the project. Each SP will analyse the data produced during the different cycles of the Educational Design Research intervention at both the teacher education and school levels. The results will then be combined to provide a comprehensive overview of the contextual features that support or hinder PTs learning about teaching ACME.