The Teachers Making for Mathematical Learning project incorporates a novel Making experience into the preparation of prospective mathematics teachers (PMTs) and documents its influence on their knowledge and their identities as mathematics teachers. The experience has already enabled dozens of PMTs to use digital design and fabrication technologies to produce new tools that support mathematics teaching and learning. Research objectives include:
(1) Describing the forms of knowledge invoked as the PMTs design and make new manipulatives to support mathematics teaching and learning,
(2) Tracing and elaborating the development of the PMTs’ technological, mathematical, pedagogical, and curricular knowledge as they engage in this work,
(3) Documenting what the PMTs’ discourse and design activity reveal about the nature and evolution of their identities as designers of mathematical instruction, and
(4) Employing an iterative design cycle to produce a curriculum module that will engage other PMTs in a similar Making experience.
Research methods involve a participatory form of inquiry that supports the PMTs’ Making activity as well as the observation and documentation of the creative and participatory practices of their Making experience, the knowledge brought to bear and advanced through those practices, and the impact of those practices on the ways they see themselves as Makers, as knowers and doers of mathematics, and as mathematics teachers.
Through this website we share the PMTs’ Maker projects, the curriculum we used to engage them in this Making experience, reflections by some of the PMTs who participated in it, design tutorials that can help other interested stakeholders participate in that experience or more humble versions of it, and reflections by mathematics teacher educators on their implementations of that curriculum.