Mungapungas and brooming revealed : independent learning in early mathematics

Abstract

This thesis looks at independent learning in two junior mathematics classrooms to investigate what the children are doing when they work by themselves while the teacher is taking another group. The study explored and recorded the classroom interactions focusing on information gained from field observations in both classes during the second and third terms of 1989. Additional information was gained from interviews with the teachers at the end of the study. The children were observed to be constructing and participating in their peer culture during the independent time. Teachers were concerned with classroom management and viewed much of the activity relating to the peer culture as "off-task" behaviour. The thesis suggests that the peer culture is made up of a complex interplay of behaviour that impinges on the mathematical learning. The dominant ideology of "child-centred" learning determined how teachers viewed this peer culture in a teaching-learning context through the position taken on the relationship between cognitive and social development. The thesis suggests that a directive teaching style dominated the classroom implementation of the BSM resource as evidenced by teachers'concerns about children's off-task behaviour when working independently of the teacher and their perception of the teaching role. A theoretical perspective that takes into account the socio-cultural discursive nature of classroom learning is used to suggest that classroom discourse is an indicator of what is happening in the classroom setting. The origins of this perspective lie in the work of both Vygotsky and Bruner. Through this theoretical framework social learning embedded in the independent time can be viewed as an important part of the learning process, more closely relating to a socio-cultural communicative teaching-learning model.