Abstract:

This paper investigates the practice of participation in an early education classroom community whose pedagogy in the learning of mathematics draws on the sociocultural perspective. The paper illuminates collective negotiation processes constructed into being across classroom members. The primary data of this paper consist of videotaped episodes of classroom interaction grounded in a day care centre community where 11 children’s progress was monitored from the age of three years to five years; the adult members of this learning community were an early childhood educator and a university researcher. The social interactions of the classroom community and the role of technological tools (such as diverse visual models) in supporting children’s mathematical cognitive skills, that is, counting ability, visual attention and metacognitive knowledge were subjected to a qualitative micro-level analysis based on an applied sociolinguistic approach to language and discourse. The analysis illuminates social and pedagogical practices that support collective meaning making and emerging mathematics learning in the classroom community. The results of the study suggest that the young children’s mathematical ability develops during the two-year observation period through the following core elements: attention to numeracy, learning of number words and mathematical story telling. The technological tools applied in the learning situations provide the children with the means to structure their experiences of their living environment and to relate them to the culture of mathematicising. The role of the teacher then is to help children to see the culture of mathematics in the world around them and to support the children’s personal growth in the area of mathematics.

Keywords:

Early education mathematics, mathematical activity, classroom interaction, learning as participation.