This alternative textbook for courses on teaching mathematics asks teachers and prospective teachers to reflect on their relationships with mathematics and how these relationships influence their teaching and the experiences of their students. Applicable to all levels of schooling, the book covers basic topics such as planning and assessment, classroom management, and organization of classroom experiences; it also introduces some novel approaches to teaching mathematics, such as psychoanalytic perspectives and post-modern conceptions of curriculum. Traditional methods-of-teaching issues are recast in a new discourse, provoking new ideas for making mathematics education meaningful to teachers as well as their students. Co-authored by a professor and coordinator of mathematics education programs, with illustrative contributions from practicing elementary, middle, and high school mathematics teachers, this book is a unique collaboration across all pre-college grades, making it ideal for teacher discussion groups at any level.
Embracing Mathematics:
- integrates pedagogy and content exploration in ways that are unique in mathematics education
- features textboxes with reflection questions and suggested explorations that can be easily utilized as homework for a course or as discussion opportunities for teacher reading groups
- offers examples of teachers' action research projects that grew out of their interactions with the main chapters in the book
- is not narrowly limited to mathematics education but incorporates curriculum studies - an invaluable asset that allows instructors to find more ways to engage students in self-reflexive acts of teaching
Embracing Mathematics is intended as a method text for undergraduate and master's-level mathematics education courses and more specialized graduate courses on mathematics education, and as a resource for teacher discussion groups.
"Embracing Mathematics...[offers] a theoretical and practical grounding for how teachers might enhance all students' access to powerful mathematical ideas-irrespective of socioeconomic background, home language, and out-of-school affiliations."--Margaret Anne Walshaw, Educational Studies in Mathematics (2010) 73:99-103
"This book is likely to have a substantial impact on the landscape of pedagogical thinking. The pedagogy is a model for how to be engaged in life, in this sense presenting a personal vision that informs more than how to teach."--David Kirshner, Louisiana State University
"Embracing Mathematics offers mathematics teachers other possibilities for teaching, in practical and very tangible ways. Simultaneously, [it] challenges the current field and provides possibilities for how these 'different' ways of considering teaching can work effectively in our current situations."--Sarah Smitherman Pratt, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
"Embracing Mathematics presents a wealth of educational ideas. It provides lenses for seeing classroom practice as open to fascinating changes. Emerging as a powerful collective achievement, it provides a dialogical opening of post-modern trends in critical mathematics education, seen as practice, as research, and as learning for everybody." Ole Skovsmose, Aalborg University, Denmark
"This is a book that helps the reader think about his/her practice. It guides teachers in a quest for teaching methods that will enable students to develop a critical mind, which should be the goal of all mathematics education. But it is also an extraordinarily practical book that along with stimulating ideas provides numerous applications, which are immediately useful in the mathematics classroom."--Corinne Hahn, Advancia-Negocia and European School of Management; President, International Commission for Study and Improvement of Mathematics Teaching
