Exploring teaching academic literacy in mathematics in teacher education

Abstract

Living in complex knowledge societies requires citizens who master multiple literacies involving both cognitive and social skills. Thus, all individuals should be offered relevant educational opportunities and teachers capable of integrating subject expertise with relational aspects. This paper demonstrates a teaching design for mathematics that student teachers have indicated integrates both these dimensions. Drawing on theoretical perspectives that conceptualize academic literacy as a socially situated discourse practice, we investigate one teacher educator’s teaching design for mathematics. The evidence indicates that the teaching approaches in this design are highly student centered and process oriented. Student teachers report that the approach supports both individual and collective learning of the discipline of mathematics while also modeling how to teach mathematics as a school subject. The teaching design comprises varied and exploratory approaches to teaching mathematics and represents an alternative to more traditional mathematics pedagogy. In this way, the study contributes to an empirically informed understanding of how the goal of learning to master academic literacy may be facilitated by a varied repertoire of writing, reading, and oral activities. The study indicates challenges for traditional teaching and teacher education more broadly.