Designing a Pedagogy of Inquiry in Teacher Education: Moving from resistance to listening

How inconvenient assumptions affect preservice teachers’ uptake of new interactional patterns in mathematics: analysis and aspiration through a bifocal lens

“…Waysof-being a teacher of mathematics have been constituted over 12 or more years; those preservice teachers who know little mathematics and/or are anxious about teaching it, are especially happy to find refuge in procedural practices that resonate so well with them. In the end the preservice teachers in Nicol's (2006) study agreed that "teaching in ways that respect students' thinking and sense-making were not worth the time, the effort or the consequences" (p. 31). These students have come to know the learning process as an instrumentality; apply it equally to all students, those who choose to be motivated and act rationally will benefit.…”

“…Similarly, Nicol (2006) demonstrates preservice teachers' constituted desire to teach procedures rather than facilitate their students' engagement in reasoning processes. Nicol (2006, p. 30) explains that she had shown the preservice teachers a video of a classroom teacher valuing her students' sense-making in mathematics, an interactional practice valued in contemporary policy and research.…”

A House of Mirrors: Seeing Myself, Seeing Mexican American Children

“…In so doing, educators move "from resistance to listening" (Nicol 2006, 1), while family members explain who they are and how schools can help their children (Nicol 2006;Palmer 2007). Studies indicate that most Mexican Americans value education and want to be involved in their children's school lives and will, given nonjudgmental assistance and a willingness to extend the traditional concept of parent involvement to include activities and actions outside the school purview (Rodríguez 2002;Valencia and Black 2002).…”

“…Mexican parents collaborated with the school particularly to discipline their children (Nicol 2006;Rodríguez 2002;Valencia and Black 2002). When I watched parent-teacher interactions I heard words from the parents such as educación, which in Spanish refers to behavior (Brice 2002).…”

The Receptive Side of Teaching

“…Do students appear to feel safe when speaking up in class, or do they risk ridicule from others? Are students showing resistance to a particular topic or assignment (Nicol 2006)? Focusing on these types of questions provides valuable information about class dynamics and guides teachers to know when redirection or intervention is required.…”