Philip C Clarkson

Australian Catholic University | ACU · Faculty of Education

Critical Issues in Mathematics Education presents the significant contributions of Professor Alan Bishop within the mathematics education research community. Six critical issues, each of which have had paramount importance in the development of mathematics education research, are reviewed and include a discussion of current developments in each are...

This chapter argues that school mathematics involves more than just the “performance” of students and that “working mathematically” means far more than being good at a specified set of skills, as well as more than being able to show mastery of various conceptual structures. It suggests that experienced teachers understand that the wellbeing of many...

Bilingual students have, at times, been thought to be at a disadvantage in learning mathematics because of an assumed interference between their two languages. Earlier research, confirmed again in this study, shows that this is a naive view to take. Although some bilingual students do have a harder time, others seem to be at an advantage. This stud...

This paper reports on an ongoing interventionist project where the notion of values is a driver for the revitalization of teaching mathematics. The designing, gathering and analyzes of data from both students and teachers, undertaken by the school staff, on what both students and staff value in mathematics, and the relationship between the values,...

This article is a reflection focused on Licona and Kelly’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-019-09946-7, 2019) paper dealing with translanguaging in science classrooms within a SSI context. I use a number of points that the authors of the original paper make to prompt my thinking about teaching in multilingual contexts, the most...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the four value alignment strategies available to educators (Scaffolding, Balancing, Intervention and Refuge) previously identified in the mathematics education literature comprehensively capture educator value alignment strategies in an intervention context. Design/Approach/Methods: To this...

We wondered, why does the mystery of mathematics seem to disappear from students: Is it because teachers have never experienced mathematical mystery? We wondered would more use of projects and investigations promote a range of mathematical values than is possible when only traditional teaching approaches are used? We wondered do teachers and studen...

Low levels of student engagement in mathematics education has been a growing concern in the Australian context and internationally. In this chapter, we will explore how value alignment strategies (Scaffolding, Balancing, Intervention and Refuge) could be used to rework conflict, resentment and disengagement of students in the mathematics classroom....

Although the ideas of values and valuing have been totemic notions in education for forever, when applied to mathematics they become quite problematic. Even today for many mathematic teachers and learners, mathematics is a value-free space. For them, school mathematics is learning the skills of manipulating numbers before moving to the more abstrac...

This evaluation study worked with 23 schools that had formed seven collectives. Rather than trying to rate each collective on a success scale, this report sort to identify key aspects of collectives that could form the basis of guidelines that the CEM may develop in the future to enhance this style of school operation. Some of the key aspects to a...

Comments on mathematics education in Papaua New Guinea from ealy colonial times to present

This engaging open access book discusses how a values and valuing perspective can facilitate a more effective mathematics pedagogical experience, and allows readers to explore multiple applications of the values perspective across different education systems. It also clearly shows that teaching mathematics involves not only reasoning and feelings,...

This chapter suggests a useful framework for teaching and researching the area of time in mathematics classrooms

This piece wonders about the place of mathematical values in teaching and learning

This chapter provides a brief overview of issues regarding research in multilingual and culturally diverse STEM teaching and learning environments. We note how multilingualism has been addressed in some STEM education research, and we offer some diverse examples of such. But we also note some of the challenges that exist in multilingual classrooms...

Discusses a framework for teaching time in primary schools and framework should be useful in researching this area

This book examines multiple facets of language diversity and mathematics education. It features renowned authors from around the world and explores the learning and teaching of mathematics in contexts that include multilingual classrooms, indigenous education, teacher education, blind and deaf learners, new media and tertiary education. Each chapte...

An evaluation of the Contemporary Approaches to Primary Science professional learning program for elementary teachers of science through the eyes of three principals.

Starting from revisiting three traditions of reflecting on linguistic transitions between registers and representations, we suggest the integrated approach of purposefully relating registers. The result is likely to enhance language-sensitive teaching strategies in multilingual classrooms that aim at conceptual understanding. Two empirical snapshot...

This chapter provides the introduction to this ICMI Study 21 volume. It includes: a discussion of the place of this study and its topic within ICME; a discussion of what is meant by the study title; and a brief historical account of research on this topic in mathematics education. The chapter also recounts the various stages of the study, including...

Multilingualism is rapidly becoming a serious challenge for many schools in South Africa, most noticeably in the Gauteng province. Not only do many schools have learners with a variety of South African indigenous languages as their home language, but numerous schools also have learners from other African countries. As a result of this language comp...

Mathematics education has increasingly in the last 30 years acknowledged the crucial role that language plays in learning. However, this has mainly been the roleof language in cognition, such as students’ understanding of mathematics concepts and relationships, and not necessarily its impact on social, cultural, and political issues and learning in...

In multilingual classrooms, use of different languages is an important, although often neglected or not appreciated, resource (Clarkson, 2007; Moschkovich, 2002). Multilingual classrooms based in multilingual and multicultural societies present potentially rich instances of language and cultural resources that can inform language sensitive teaching...

Michael Somare, Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) first prime minister pleaded with his people to “accept old traditional values but at the same time, adapt easily to an alien electronic age of the twentieth century” (Griffen, Nelson, & Firth, 1979). The second prime minister, Julius Chan, was reported to say; “There’s no ‘Melanesian Way’ to pilot aircraft”...

Contemporary concerns in mathematics education recognize that in the increasingly technological and globalized world, with concomitant change in population demographics (e.g. immigration, urbanization) and a change in the status of languages (e.g. English as a dominant language of science and technology) multilingualism in classrooms is a norm rath...

A report from the Discussion Group on collecting data on values in mathematics classrooms

A short observational report on the Contemporary Approaches to Primary Science (CAPS), which was a professional learning program for elementary teachers in science

This is the final report of the Bseline Survey evaluation project of PASTEP (Primary and Secondary Teacher Education) that ran in Papua New Guinea from 1998 through 2003.

This theoretical paper is aimed at provoking more research by proposing a new teaching model that will meet the needs of both monolingual but in particular bilingual students. A teacher 'language use model' commonly employed is first critiqued. It suggests teachers should encourage students to first use everyday English when learning new mathematic...

In this chapter we discuss how the Internet is interacting with mathematics education. After briefly discussing the rise of the Internet and its impact on education, we suggest that it has the potential to disrupt mathematics teaching and learning. Moving far beyond its used as a data resource, we suggest the Internet will provide on-demand access...

An evaluation of a professional learning program for teachers based on Bob Wright work with early number learning

Three early career primary school teachers shared their perceptions of changes in their teaching of mathematics 8–18 months after their participation in an action research project. Comparing data collected throughout the lifetime of the project with analyses of participants’ reflections written in response to three open-ended questions posed months...

In this review of the literature the focus is on the latest display resource for teachers, the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), a device that brings the possibility of seamlessly moving from visual, to audio, to tactile manipulation on an interactive board, as well as accessing all the resources of the Internet. Government education departments have h...

During 2008-2009 while participating in a mathematics professional learning study, fifteen teachers, from seven different Australian primary schools, met as a group on five occasions to share their experiences and reflections on their teaching of mathematics. At each meeting, they discussed their goals, action plans and progress. To contextualise t...

Teaching decisions made ‘in the moment’ do not often allow for deliberate, well thought through actions by teachers. Sometimes we are conscious of the options that are available and we do make deliberate decisions. We may even be aware of the values impinging on our decision, but for many other aspects embedded in our teaching, deeper influences im...

The classrooms of Papua New Guinea are multilingual. For many years only the official language of education, English, was permitted for teaching. In the mid 1990s the curriculum changed to declare that multiple languages would be used in teaching in the first three years of schooling. In the next year English is introduced, and gradually over the n...

This paper reports on change in teachers' perceptions of important elements of their role as teachers of mathematics at the conclusion of a two-year professional learning project. Analyses of written responses to survey items indicated shifts in four categories describing important elements of their role: teaching skills, knowledge, concepts; devel...

Globalisation is impacting on education, even in the very localised site of the classroom. One aspect of this process is what and the way language is used in the teaching of mathematics. This chapter draws attention to mathematics teaching, which inevitably relies on deep communication, in various multilingual contexts. Examples are given of the va...

This paper reports on change in teachers' perceptions of important elements of their role as teachers of mathematics at the conclusion of a two-year professional learning project. Analyses of written responses to survey items indicated shifts in four categories describing important elements of their role: teaching skills, knowledge, concepts; devel...

This paper proposes a new technique for digital video data collection by teachers to be utilized for their professional learning. The two key differences for this new approach is first to give teachers the decisions of what and when to collect data, and second for them to collect their own data by using hand held video cameras in their classrooms....

Multilingual classrooms are the normal learning contexts for most children throughout the world. However not all such contexts are identical. This distinction is not always made in the literature. In this paper the multilingual context for classrooms in many urban classrooms in Australia is described before exploring a possible model that might be...

Doing a graduate psychology course with Jerome Bruner switched me on. I thought to myself, we should be doing more of this stuff (research) in education, and in mathematics education. Gee! You know! Why are just psychologists doing this stuff? Soooo I took on various tutoring jobs just to check out some things. I tutored at a mental hospital. I tau...

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons...

In 2002 the language policy for teaching mathematics in Malaysia was changed from the national language Malay, to English, to be implemented from the beginning of 2003. This gave the curriculum developers and importantly the teachers just six months to prepare for this change. This small study investigated how after 18 months, 22 secondary teachers...

The effects of the increasing international academi c contacts and the globalisations of research and curriculum in mathematics education ar e wide spread and their impacts are experienced differently in many countries around th e world. This paper reports on data from three focus groups conducted with mathematics educators from universities in Aus...

In Australia there are many students in mathematics classrooms whose first language is not English. These Non English Speaking Background pupils learn their mathematics in a second or third language. Australian mathematics teachers have had little professional help with this teaching situation. Although a naive view may regard this situation as a p...