Operationalising Wenger’s communities of practice theory for use in multilingual mathematics teacher education contexts

Abstract

In this chapter, we draw substantially on Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice (CoP) theory to develop and then propose a methodological approach for analyzing pre-service mathematics teacher education multilingual classrooms. The approach emerged in Essien’s (2013) study that investigated how pre-service mathematics teachers were being prepared to teach mathematics in multilingual contexts. Like many others in mathematics education, the theoretical frame for the study drew from a disciplinary domain in the social sciences to investigate the teaching and learning of mathematics.