This study takes a particular look at mathematics teacher education communities of
practice (CoPs) in order to provide rich descriptions of the CoPs and make claims about
its relation/in relation to teacher preparation and particularly the preparation of preservice
teachers for teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms. The three
dimensions of communities of practice proposed by Wenger (mutual engagement, shared
repertoire and joint enterprise) were used in conjunction with Mortimer and Scott’s
notion of meaning making as a dialogic process as a theoretical lens to gain an entry into
the nature of communities of practice in pre-service mathematics teacher education
classrooms. Data was collected through pre-observation interviews of 12 teacher
educators at four Universities in one Province in South Africa in Phase One of the study.
A methodological approach based on Wenger’s CoP theory and Mortimer and Scott’s
dialogic process was developed and used to analyse classroom observation videos of four
of these teacher educators’ classroom communities of practice in two universities in
Phase Two of the study. Using the privileged practices in the CoPs as points of departure
and how these practices shaped and were shaped by other dynamics in the CoPs, the
findings emerging from the study indicate that within the multiply layers of teacher
education, there is an overarching emphasis given to the acquisition of mathematical
content. Nevertheless, the communicative approaches and patterns of discourse used by
the different teacher educators opened up different possibilities as far as preparing preservice
teachers for teaching (in multilingual classrooms) is concerned.
Wenger’s community of practice theory has found applications in different spheres of life
and in different organisational and educational settings. Its use to understand and describe
mathematics pre-service classrooms is, however, still largely unexplored. A theoretical
contribution that this study makes lies in the extension of Wenger’s CoP theory to include
dialogic processes. A methodological contribution lies in the development of an
organisational language (based on Wenger’s three dimensions of CoP) to characterise
pre-service teacher education classrooms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/13172 |
| Date | 01 October 2013 |
| Creators | Essien, Anthony Anietie |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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