Tracing threads of awareness in initial teacher education: Peer-collaboration.

Abstract

This paper reports on a UK project exploring the learning of preservice primary teachers whilst they engaged in doing mathematics and how this experience shaped their subsequent teaching. During university-based sessions, we presented a number of visual growing patterns for preservice teachers to investigate collaboratively and to consider possible approaches to use in their teaching. We draw on aspects of enactivism and the notion of reflective spection in the context of teacher learning, tracing threads between preservice teachers’ retro-spection of their own learning and pro-spection of their approach to teaching. Our findings suggest that preservice teachers emphasize the importance of collaboration in ‘seeing’ what others ‘see’ and that this influences their teaching.