Mobile inquiry-as-play in mathematics teacher education

Abstract

This study describes the feasibility of designing and fostering pre-service teacher inquiry at the intersection of community and disciplinary engagement. Mapping My Math (MMM), a gamebased and mobile learning activity, guided pre-service teachers in playfully exploring mathematics featured in the everyday activities of people and places, and creatively representing this inquiry with digital media. This study draws from design-based research that examined the role of place, digital media, and mobility in mathematics teacher education. Design narrative methods describe how MMM was created, implemented, and refined to support disciplinary inquiry across settings given the evolution of tools, activities, and practices. The study and design narrative address the following question: How can game-based and mobile learning be designed to support pre-service teachers' disciplinary inquiry of everyday mathematics? Findings shared in this study's design narrative attend to the quality of pre-service teachers' inquiry-as-play, or expressive mobility situated amongst learners' social and material relations, disciplinary concepts, and the built environment. Implications from this study concern: the role of mobile learning in mathematics teacher education to connect school, community, and online settings; the potential of gameful design to impact pre-service teacher learning across settings; and the importance of fostering disciplinary inquiry whereby pre-service teachers can "navigate" their own learning. Game-based and mobile learning designs, like MMM, can create the conditions for cross-setting mobility as generative of inquiry-as-play in mathematics teacher education. MMM encouraged pre-service teachers to playfully leverage disciplinary practices that shaped new relationships with mathematics, their city, and the mathematics of place and community. Author BioJeremiah Holden is a teacher educator and learning scientist whose interests and design-based research concerns learning across settings, educators' design of games, and mobile learning. As Assistant Professor of Information and Learning Technologies at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development, Jeremiah is a Creative Research Collaborative Fellow and also a member of the University of Colorado's President's Teaching and Learning Collaborative. His current research examines research-practice partnerships that support classroom teachers in designing game-based and mobile learning for interdisciplinary inquiry and civic engagement across school, online, and community settings. 2A brisk morning with monochrome gray midwestern skies. 24 pre-service teachers leave their university classroom. Walking across campus, they carry personal mobile devices and maps, as well as concepts like the geometric properties of shapes and units of measurement. Divided into eight teams, pre-service teachers engage in a playful curricular module, their mobile investigation and interpretation concerning mathematics situated among familiar settings and...