Background

The multicultural nature of classrooms is a significant challenge in many European countries. The teacher’s job is all the more difficult because he/she is usually not sufficiently prepared to deal with a classroom context with pupils having a migrant background, coming from countries with different cultures and different languages. Teaching materials focusing on migrant students do exist, but mostly for languages, not for mathematics. Mathematics teachers feel the necessity for training and materials which reflect the needs of their classes in terms of linguistic and cultural differences. Their students with a migrant background encounter even more difficulties than their native classmates in acquiring fundamental maths skills. The seven partners of this project are four teacher training and research institutions and three schools. They developed ready-to-use teaching units and concepts for teaching units. Mathematics teachers then used these concepts to create concrete teaching units and teach those units to their own students. They wrote up a summary about the strategies teachers used to make the units work for their migrant students (and their non-migrant students as well), which gives mathematics teachers both a guideline with possible strategies and a collection of case studies showing them how other teachers turned the concepts into concrete teaching units, how that worked out and eventually how it can be improved.

Objectives

It is the objective of this project to develop, evaluate, revise, finalise, publish and disseminate ready-to-use teaching units in mathematics for primary, lower and upper secondary level schools, specifically designed for students with a migrant background. It is also the objective of this project to develop and evaluate teaching unit concepts (a "teaching unit concept" is a scaffold or an outline that contains a theoretical framework and anchor points; it can be used to create full-fledged teaching units out of it, with various contexts and mathematical topics). It is another objective to let mathematics teachers create and teach concrete teaching units (based on the teaching unit concepts) for their own classrooms with migrant and non-migrant students, and for mathematics educators to observe, record and evaluate the teaching, analyse the different strategies teachers used to turn the given concepts into teaching units, and create “good practice” guidelines from that. It is finally the objective to organize a final international conference, workshops, and teacher training events in partner and non-partner countries.

Implementation

The project team created draft versions (in English) of ready-to-use teaching units in mathematics, and of teaching unit concepts, in university/school teams, had other partners and an external expert cross-check and evaluate these drafts, finalised and translated them into Czech, German, Greek, and Italian, and published them on the project website. The school partners took these concepts and used them to create full sample teaching units for their own classrooms and teach those, and staff from university/research partners record or observe these lessons. The university/research partners then conducted interviews with and/or provided questionnaires to teachers from school partners, and with/to school students who participated in these lessons, and analysed this data. The results of this process were then compiled into case studies. The different strategies teachers used to turn the given concepts into teaching units that worked for their classrooms and their framework was then analysed and the results summarised into guidelines for other teachers who want to use the concepts to create teaching units for their own classrooms. The project team organised a final conference with workshops to present the project results and to work with teachers and teacher trainers from various countries, organised several regional workshops and training events in the partner countries, organised teacher training events together with additional institutions from non-partner-countries, and disseminated (and continue to do so) the project results using a wide variety of regional, national, and international dissemination channels.

Results

The main results are 46 ready-to-use teaching units in mathematics (each consisting of an introduction with basic information, a schedule/time matrix, and all necessary teaching materials) specifically designed for students with a variety of migrant backgrounds, 10 concepts for teaching units in mathematics, and 20 case studies (2 per teaching unit concept; each consisting of full teaching units created by teachers of school partners based on the concepts, an analysis of questionnaire/interviews conducted after the teaching unit with teachers and school students, and improvement suggestions based on interviews/questionnaires).
Other results are "good practice" guidelines (summary of the analysis of teachers' strategies to create new teaching units based on the teaching unit concepts, with didactical comment), a website with project information and all results for free download, and a variety of information and training events.