CAREER: Building a Theory of Teacher Learning With and About Mathematics Curriculum: The Role of Innovative K-12 Materials in Elementary Teacher Education

This project focuses on the professional development of prospective elementary teachers in the context of current mathematics education reform efforts in the United States. Challenging conventional views of mathematics teaching and learning, reform visions posit the processes of investigation, sense-making, and communication as central mathematics classroom activities. Numerous empirical studies over the past decade have indicated that teachers' attempts to enact reform visions in their classrooms are fraught with conceptual and practical challenges, many of which relate to teachers' lack of personal familiarity with reform-oriented instructional practices and representations of mathematics. In light of this situation, this project creates opportunities for prospective teachers to learn about mathematics and pedagogy by working with reform-oriented K-12 curriculum materials, and examines how such experiences can promote meaningful, long-term changes in prospective teachers' conceptions and classroom practices. In the mathematics and methods courses required of prospective elementary teachers, strategies will be developed for using reform-oriented curriculum materials to support the transformation of prospective teachers' conceptions of mathematics, teaching, and learning. The specific challenges that teachers encounter through engagement with curriculum materials, and the impact of these challenges on teachers' conceptions and early classroom practices, will be investigated using interpretive case study methods. Through examination of prospective and beginning teachers' learning with and about curriculum, this project will produce vital findings about the role that innovative curriculum materials can play in the educational reform process. Such results have potential to impact the content and processes of teacher preparation and professional development programs in mathematics education.