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The subject matters, but it’s the interaction that endures
A few years ago I was invited to the 25th high school reunion of a class that I’d taught. As I visited throughout the evening I learned about lives after high school. I also heard stories of high school teachers who had affected my former students most positively and the stories of teachers who had affected them most negatively.
I realized that the stories of teachers who had had an impact on students did not include the stories of how well the teacher “taught” particular subjects or lessons but were about how a teacher had interacted with them while they were in the class to learn a particular subject. This experience caused me to think about the complexity of my work as a mathematics teacher educator.
I expect that students come to my university classes to learn how to teach secondary school mathematics. And I have a responsibility to teach them about teaching mathematics. At the same time, my experience at the reunion reminded me that my work, and the work of a teacher education program, is not just about teaching preservice teachers about “teaching mathematics.”
I need to “make visible” to preservice teachers that the students they will teach come to their classes expecting to learn mathematics; as professionals they have a responsibility to use a variety of techniques to help their students understand the mathematics they are teaching; and out of the interactions of those high school students’ expectations of learning mathematics and the expectations of teaching mathematics emerge the stories of the impacts of student-teacher relationships that stay with their students long after they have completed the classes.
I hope that, as preservice teachers engage in courses throughout a teacher education program, they come to understand about the complexity of living out interactions within classrooms, and that those interactions are influenced by historical, societal and political stories.
Dr. Florence Glanfield is a professor and chair of the department of secondary education at the University of Alberta.
