Although there are often calls for teachers to gain professional digital competency so they can provide appropriate experiences to the coming generations, there have been few insights about what knowledge and skills are needed by early childhood teachers, especially when engaging children with mathematics. In this article, the six areas of professional digital competency, outlined in the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators, are used to frame a discussion about the skills and knowledge that teachers, working in early childhood centres, need for working in early childhood centres. Our focus is on teachers working with a social policy pedagogical approach, which is based on children’s own interests and play, as is the case in Norway. Using research articles as a basis, suggestions are offered about how to redefine the six areas for early childhood teachers. These suggestions are predominantly aimed at teacher educators who design courses to introduce preservice and inservice teachers to integrate digital technologies into their work with mathematics for young children. Suggestions are also made about the kind of research which is needed that could contribute valuable information to future discussions and support the further development of teacher education courses.

Even though teacher educators are often recognized as key actors in implementing curriculum reforms, little is known about their joint meaning-making about these reforms. In this article, Bernstein’s description of the general recontextualizing processes is used to identify the local processes which contributed to teacher educators’ meaning-making, when a new school curriculum reform was introduced in Norway. The reform was about integrating computational thinking, including programming, into mathematics teaching. Audio recordings and documentation from groups of teacher educators’ first discussions about the reform in a professional seminar were analyzed, using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. In developing their meaning-making, the teacher educators adapted their previous knowledge through two local recontextualizing processes, which were labeled simplifying and solidifying. Through joint negotiation, simplifying reduced the complexity of computational thinking, while solidifying simultaneously built up certainty about how to integrate the reform into the teacher educators’ existing practices. The formation and implementation of these local processes were affected by the short time between the introduction of the curriculum and its inclusion into mathematics teacher education courses, as well as the specific contextual features of the seminar.

In our action research projects as teacher educators, we focus on broadening preservice teachers' understandings about language diversity in mathematics classrooms, away from just improving students' fluency in the language of instruction. To undertake these projects, we developed a flexible analytical tool, for identifying those pedagogical practices which could be improved and so broaden pre-service teachers' understandings about language diversity. By documenting the development of the analytical tool, we provide insights into how action research projects can contribute to aims for social justice. Using data from a wider project, the analytical tool is discussed in regard to its possibilities for identifying practices that could be improved, its validity and reliability, and its potential for use in other action research projects.

Mathematics teacher education is often described in terms of the mathematical content and pedagogy that teachers need. However, recent calls for equity in mathematics education demand a broadening of this view. In this article, we articulate a theoretical description of what the role of being an advocate in language-diverse classrooms could involve and some of the practical challenges that mathematics teacher educators may have when introducing it, using empirical examples from our teacher education courses for teachers of Grades 1–7 in Norway. In the theoretical description of the role of being an advocate into mathematics teacher education, we distinguish between in-class advocacy and advocacy beyond the classroom and what these different kinds of advocacy might entail in language-diverse classrooms. The practical issues that we identified in raising different aspects of the role indicate the need for further research into how to raise preservice teachers’ awareness about the role of being an advocate, in and outside of the classroom, in different cultural settings and how this knowledge could be used in teacher education to challenge preservice teachers’ language ideologies and raise non-trivial issues.

Preservice teachers’ and teacher educators’ views on multilingual school students’ mathematical learning possibilities have been researched in the last decade. However, there are limited studies on how language and cultural differences in mathematical argumentation can broaden mathematics education learning possibilities in teacher education. Using multilingual preservice teachers’ evaluations of examples of Grade 4 students’ multimodal mathematical argumentation, the influence of different cultures and languages is explored. In a teacher education workshop, preservice teachers seemed to use different evaluation criteria for Grade 4 students’ mathematical argumentation, depending on their home language and culture. Nevertheless, the teacher educator only made use of some differences in evaluation criteria to broaden understandings about how young students’ mathematical argumentation can be affected by language and cultural expectations. Consequently, there are implications for multilingual mathematics teacher education courses.

This systematic literature review examined how teacher education prepared early childhood pre-service teachers to utilise digital technology with children. After searching in relevant databases the review analysed 21 articles, most of which have been published in recent years. The findings indicate that while some educational institutions have a dedicated course about digital technology, others have integrated digital competence into existing courses. Nevertheless, the review found that there is little emphasis on how to incorporate a wide range of educational technologies. Additionally, the results revealed that most teacher education curricula do not have a strong digital focus, thus indicating a need for a greater focus on combining theoretical knowledge with practical implementation for pre-service teachers. The findings indicate that further research is required in early childhood teacher education to identify ways in which digital technologies can be integrated into a more holistic approach to facilitating young children's learning.

AbstractProgrammable robots are now found in many early childhood centres. However, little research has considered how young children’s problem solving may link computational thinking to mathematical understandings. While most research about robots in kindergarten is from intervention studies to improve children’s computational thinking, in this study we observed two children solving tasks with a robot in a naturalistic setting. We identified when the children had a problem that they could not immediately solve, by looking for signs of uncertainty, for example by putting their hand to their mouth, stopping and/or looking up at the teacher. By analysing the children’s problem solving of those problems, alongside a teacher, we were able to identify how aspects of computational thinking were connected to mathematical understanding. In particular, number understandings, such as the difference between ordinal and cardinal counting and early addition, seemed important for solving problems related to sequencing, decomposition and debugging. The children’s developing understanding about counting may have contributed to the children’s uncertainty about programming the robot.

"Mathematics is an important part of children’s daily life. The value of mathematics for young children is reflected in curricula for early childhood in the Nordic countries and consequently, mathematics education courses are included in teacher education for early childhood. However, mathematics in early childhood education is understood in different ways, influenced by both politics and research, and practitioners’ approach to the field. As a field of research, mathematics education for young children is fairly new in the Nordic countries."

As has been the case in many countries around the world, the new Norwegian curriculum from 2020 included programming as part of mathematics education. However, little is known about how prospective teachers perceive this addition in regard to their developing professional identities. When the results from an electronic survey of 394 prospective teachers showed unexpected findings, five of the subjects were asked to participate in a focus group interview in order to explore some of these results. The focus group interview was conducted to understand how prospective teachers considered the past, present and future aspects of their professional identities as teachers of mathematics through programming. The results reveal that, although the prospective teachers had little experience of programming, they were positive regarding its implementation in mathematics lessons because they identified themselves as digital natives; they therefore believed that learning to program would be easy. They aligned themselves with their students, as masters of technology, in contrast to their future colleagues, whom they implicitly described as digital immigrants. The findings of this study have implications for teacher education. Even if the prospective teachers have a positive attitude toward programming and consider themselves digitally competent, a limited understanding of how programming can be integrated into their mathematics teaching will affect the identities that they see for themselves as teachers who teach mathematics through programming.

Med gjeninnføring av lek i skolens læreplan er det behov for å vurdere hvordan lek har vært knyttet til matematikk i barnehagen. Vi bruker en modell som kobler sammen barns lek med det å stille og å løse problemer, til å analysere barnehagebarns engasjement med digitale apper og til andreklassingers skriving av regnefortellinger. Analysen viser hvordan lek kan oppstå når barna stiller problemer, og når de prøver ut ulike løsningsstrategier. Vi anser at resultatet av forskningen kan gi innsikt til matematikklærere i de første skoleårene om lekens potensial i arbeid med problemstilling og problemløsning. English abstract Play with problems With the reintroduction of play in the school’s curriculum, there is a need to assess how play has been linked to mathematics in kindergarten. We use a model that connects children’s play with posing and solving problems to analyse kindergarten children’s involvement with digital apps and 2nd grade students’ writing of regnefortellinger or number stories. The analysis shows how play can occur when the children pose problems and when they try out different solution strategies. We believe that the results of the research can provide insight to mathematics teachers in the first years of school about the potential for play in problem posing and problem solving.

To increase possibilities for listening respectfully to Indigenous educators, there is a need to identify conversational prompts which are used to raise alternative views of social justice about mathematics education for Indigenous students. Using Nancy Fraser’s description of abnormal social justice, an analysis was made of transcripts from round table sessions, at an Indigenous mathematics education conference. This analysis identified a number of conversational prompts that enabled shifts from normal to abnormal discussions about social justice. Normal discussions exhibited assumptions in which mathematics was valued as a Western domain of knowledge; cultural examples could be used as vehicles to teach mathematics; and decisions about education for Indigenous students should be made by external authorities. In abnormal discussions, these assumptions were queried and alternative possibilities arose. The conversational prompts, which initiated this querying, occurred in a number of ways, including the telling of stories and the asking of questions that either directly or indirectly challenged normal justice discourses about Indigenous students’ learning of mathematics. Identifying conversational prompts can assist non-Indigenous mathematics educators, who wish to be allies, to challenge their own and others’ assumptions about normal social justice issues related to mathematics education for Indigenous students.

Although it is assumed that parents influence their children’s lives, little is known about how students navigate between their own expectations and their parents’ views of mathematics and how this navigation affects mathematical learning. Using an exemplary case of Philip, we illustrate how he made sense of his father’s high expectations related to his engagement with mathematics. There were three tensions evident in Philip’s stories about mathematics related to these expectations: the utility of mathematics for his future career; his expectations of doing well in mathematics; and the value of mathematics teachers. The results, elaborated on by the perspectives of the other students in Philip’s Year 10 class, shed light on the complexity and fluidity of secondary school students’ identities, in relationship to their mathematical engagement.

Gestures have been shown to reflect speakers’ embodied thinking about mathematical concepts and play a role in conveying understandings in teaching/learning interactions. However little research has been done to consider the similarities and differences in the functions that a particular gesture might have in mathematics classrooms in different parts of the world. In this paper, the occurrence of a metaphorical gesture to do with addition in a bilingual mathematics classroom in the UK and two Spanish-speaking classrooms in Chile is investigated. To do this, we elaborate on Systemic Functional Linguistics to consider how the gesture is integrated with other modes of communication to reflect the immediate context of situation as well as a wider mathematics education context of culture. An analysis of the interactions in three classrooms illustrates how the gesture seemed to convey extra meanings, sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory, to what was expressed through other modes. Besides adding meaning to the mathematical ideas conveyed verbally, the gesture could potentially convey meanings to participants in the interactions about interpersonal relationships which were not as evident in the verbal communication.