In November, 1986, Mrs Lorna Ireland; Principal of Junee Primary School in the
Riverina Region of New South Wales; approached a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics
Education at Riverina-Murray Institute of Higher Education in Wagga Wagga; seeking
his involvement in a project aimed to assist teachers at the school with their
mathematics teaching. In addition to the planned involvement in 1987 of this
mathematics educator, the school was also to be a pilot school for the trialling of a
strand of the New South Wales Education Department's Draft Mathematics Curriculum
and a participating school in the numeracy component of the federal government's
Basic Learning in Primary Schools program.
This study documents the mathematics education activities which involved Junee
Primary School teachers in 1987. It focuses on the RMIHE involvement in the school
but considers this in the context of broader mathematics curriculum activity. The
process of change is described within a theoretical framework derived from a review
of relevant literature.
The research methodology employed is fundamentally ethnographic and relies on the
collection of qualitative data to derive descriptions of people and events. The data
analysis relates to curriculum change, the role of the change agent and the role of
mathematics educators in school mathematics programs. A discussion of outcomes
highlights the strengths of an approach to curriculum change which had its genesis in
the school rather than in some external agency. The generation of problems and issues
and the resolution of these are features of the analysis which tracks the progress
towards professional development autonomy of one group of teachers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218995 |
| Date | January 1988 |
| Creators | Hawthorne, Wendy, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Wendy Hawthorne |
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