Learning to "notice" the mathematics teaching: adopting a socio-cultural perspective on student teachers' learning

There are different approaches used by mathematics teacher educators to help pre-service primary teachers develop the useful skills and knowledge required to teach mathematics. One of these approaches is concerned to learning to notice relevant aspects in mathematics teaching. But making mathematics teaching meaningful is a challenge to pre-service teachers in which the features of instructional tasks that they must carry out in their teacher education programs influence their learning and knowing. Nowadays communication and information technologies are providing new conditions and tools to assist pre-service teachers in learning to notice relevant aspects of mathematics teaching and to develop their relationships to pupils’ ways of thinking. Addition to, it is became to be assumed that online discussions encourage the collaborative process in which meaning is negotiated and knowledge is construed when videotaped from mathematics lesson are analysed. From here, the question of how forms of participation operate to mediate meanings in conversation is central to our understanding of the contribution of socio-cultural perspectives about mathematics teacher learning. In this chapter I describe the design of virtual learning environments reflecting aspects from socio-cultural perspectives that might support pre-service primary teachers’ learning process about mathematics teaching.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant EDU2008-05483