Types of teaching analyzed by chronotopic relations

From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@udel.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 17:50:13 PDT


Dear Jay, Ana, and everybody-

Reading Ana's and Jay's discussion of personal voices in teaching and
learning math and about relations among chronotopes in teaching
(chronotopic system) inspire me to develop a website that explores diverse
types of teaching. The typology is based diverse chronotopic relations
between the didactic chronotope (i.e., time-space-value organized by the
school teaching curricula) and other chronotopes like local, ontological,
cultural-communal.

Please see my unfinished efforts at
http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/cultures/Teaching.htm I added 2 min video clips
so you can make your own observations and judgments about my analysis of the
diverse teaching types. Three notes: 1) I could not put a clip for
"Familiarazed alienated teaching" because I do not have access to it from
home (I'll try to put it on the web on Monday, 2) all video examples except
one are about math instruction (as Jay points out I can't find video
illustrating Personalized teaching in math), 3) I do not like labels so I'd
appreciate to your suggestions.

Please share your observations and ideas about the teaching patterns.

What do you think?

Eugene
PS I'm thankful to my Delaware colleague Jim Hiebert for sharing TIMSS
videos with me. Thanks to my son, Tym Matusov, for discussing traditional
teaching and writing analysis of video clip.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 11:10 PM
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> Subject: RE: personalizing voice
>
>
>
>
> Reading some of Eugene's responses in this thread, I realized that he was
> concerned with personal voice of both students and teachers, especially in
> their dialogues.
>
> I certainly agree with him that as much as constructivist math education
> has come to dominate the academic field, and a fairly wide spectrum of
> teacher education in math, it has not penetrated much into either the
> textbooks or classroom practice in many places, perhaps especially in
inner
> city schools in the US.
>
> I wonder if anyone here can identify math textbooks or curricula that do
> stimulate more of the kind of dialogue Eugene is talking about, where
> students can take critical stances toward mathematical inquiry and its
> relationship to other aspects of social life? (I will ask some of my math
> ed colleagues about this.) I believe that there is at least one "math and
> society" curriculum around, and I think that the NCTE math standards,
which
> are de facto the national standards in the US, do include issues of math
> and society, and critical thinking. Some versions of these standards I
> think do also include some examples.
>
> What is the situation in other countries? In Europe? in Japan? Russia is
> certainly known for having a very successful math education program, which
> relies a lot on challenging students with very difficult problems. Japan I
> believe emphasizes comparisons of alternative solutions to problems. I
> would expect that math education in the Netherlands or Scandinavia at
least
> would include some math and society emphasis?
>
> All that of course only makes it a bit easier to get personalized voice in
> dialogue in math education. It does not guarantee it. Too much math
> education, especially in the US, but I think also elsewhere, is heavily
> "decontextualized", which mathematicians call "pure" or "conceptual". Some
> mathematicians very strongly believe that it is the special contribution
of
> mathematics to education to teach students how to think about formal
> systems independently of any concrete context. I have had a few debates on
> this. It is certainly true that one approach to mathematics, and the one
> most pure mathematicians have favored in the 20th century, does offer this
> possibility. And some students may welcome it, and all students should
have
> the opportunity to at least experience it. But I do not see it as
> reasonable that it be a major part of a required curriculum for all
> students. A more "applied" approach to mathematics, linking it to science,
> technology, social analysis, computer programming and information
> processing, etc. seems a lot more realistic and of value to students and
> society. Pure mathematics is an extremely specialized mode of thought that
> has limited uses and appeals to a limited range of personal interests. But
> others disagree, I know. (I personally happen to enjoy pure mathematics,
up
> to a point.)
>
> I have recently been reading a set of interviews done with educational
> leaders in urban school districts in the US as part of an assessment of
> national efforts to promote reform of math education. A point was made in
> one of them, and substantiated in others, that large urban school
districts
> in the US tend to be heavily textbook-centered in the field of math
> education. This has to do with efforts at standardization, with poorly
> prepared math teachers in many classes, with the need for take-home
> materials for practicing skills, etc. It was said that math textbook
> publishers have only made superficial "cosmetic" changes to their
> mass-market textbooks to accommodate the new mathematics standards. There
> has not been any fundamental change of philosophy or presentation.
> "Constructivism" simply means leading students step-by-step to skills or
> concepts, which is more or less what was done before. The rest is left to
> teachers, but many teachers do not feel comfortable with improvising their
> own curricula and simply follow the textbook, adding a bit of group-work,
> some discussion of student solutions at the chalkboard, etc. But this does
> not encourage much personalization of voice.
>
> And I think we should acknowledge here as well that we not only value
> personalization of voice for its own sake, but we are assuming that
without
> personalization of voice in relation to a subject, whether mathematics or
> any other, that we are not likely to find learning that is either creative
> or integrated into long-term habits of thought.
>
> JAY.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 01:00:09 PDT