THE "N" FRAMEWORK – A POTENTIAL SOLUTION TO NUMERACY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

Numeracy is often referred to as an essential skill that all people should possess in order to engage fully in society. Governments and policymakers around the world are encouraging teachers to teach numeracy across the curriculum. This paper proposes a theoretical framework of teacher knowledge for the integration of numeracy across the curriculum in post-primary schools in Ireland. Teacher knowledge is complex and consists of many different facets of knowledge. The proposed framework integrates theories from existing models of general teacher knowledge (Shulman, 1986), with models of subject specific teacher knowledge (Ball, Thames and Phelps, 2008), and with a numeracy model developed by Goos, Geiger and Forgasz (2014). This enabled the authors to develop an integrated framework of numeracy knowledge and skills, subject-specific knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge which are all essential components of knowledge for teaching in the 21st century. Teachers need to have a deep understanding of these different types of knowledge to teach students effectively in any subject across all subjects