Abstract:

Many writers have questioned the relevance of progressive pedagogies and western notions of teacher professionalism in under-resourced education systems. Contrary to progressive ideologies and western notions of what classroom teaching ought to look like, many authors have suggested that procedural knowledge dominates teachers’ classroom practice internationally. The means by which classroom videotaped lessons are coded and analysed remains an underdeveloped area with scholars adopting substantially different approaches to the task. In their comparative study, the Mathematics Education Tradition of Europe (METE) developed a coding schedule that focuses on learning outcomes and didactic strategies teachers are observed to privilege as they go about their teaching across five European countries: Flemish, Belgium, England, Finland, Hungary and Spain. In developing this coding schedule, the METE team exploited the work that emphasises conceptual understanding, adaptive expertise and mathematical proficiency. In the study reported here, the author investigated classroom practice of three South African secondary school mathematics teachers. Drawing on video recordings of sequences of lessons taught on different mathematics topics, the author demonstrates how he expanded the METE coding schedule using a bottom-up process of grounded theory. The quantitative analysis shows that this expansion enabled him to capture a greater degree of nuance in classroom practice in a context where procedural knowledge is dominant. This suggest that coding schedules that are grounded on progressive pedagogies and theoretical notions of what classroom practice ought to look like depict an incomplete picture of what teachers actually do in contexts where procedural knowledge is dominant.