Section archive - Preservice Teachers

This qualitative study explores how candidates’ action research (AR) projects reflect critical AR. The author argues candidates who conduct critical AR promote its emancipatory goals and indicate a commitment to act as change agents for social justice through education. Candidates’ AR projects reveal that the majority explored cultural and institutional factors that may affect schooling. Additionally, students reported actions taken during and after the AR course that show a developing commitment to incorporate democratic practices into the teaching and learning process.

This case study investigated preservice teachers’ perceptions of digital games and their experiences designing and building an educational digital game. In this study, the authors sought to understand enactivism by applying the theory to practice and demonstrating a successful implementation of enactivism in a teacher education classroom. By adapting enactivist approaches, they have created a learning world that incorporates complex real-world problems while giving learners great freedom of exploration. Teachers in this study demonstrate all the 21st century skills through the game design and building experience. Teachers learning in such an enactivist world changed their perceptions. The creative process of designing games forced them to move out of their comfort zones, demonstrating that they were capable of making fun and interesting games.

In this study, the authors wanted preservice teachers’ (PSTs) to understand and recognize that their beliefs and stereotypes about math, along with their level of math anxiety, have a direct correlation to how they teach math, both positively and negatively. Negative math experiences lead PSTs to think they are not good at math. This lack of math knowledge and confidence then impacts the type of math teacher they become. In order to provide the PSTs alternative ways to teach math, this study implemented research-based practices aimed to math anxiety and change their negative beliefs and stereotypes. The authors found that PSTs loved the variety of ways math manipulatives were taught and used. This evidence suggested that the specific strategies utilized by the professor would have a positive impact on the PSTs’ beliefs and stereotypes about math, along with decreasing their level of math anxiety.

This study examines prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ understanding and sense making of representational quantities generated by algebra tiles, the quantitative units inherent in the nature of these quantities, and the quantitative addition and multiplication operations—referent preserving versus referent transforming compositions—acting on these quantities. Two student–teachers constantly relied on an additive interpretation of the context, whereas three others were able to distinguish between and when to rely on an additive or a multiplicative interpretation of the context. The results indicate that the identification and coordination of the representational quantities and their units at different categories are critical aspects of quantitative reasoning and need to be emphasized in the teaching–learning process.