This blogpost was authored by Professor Signe E. Kastberg, who is a mathematics teacher educator at Purdue University, USA. She visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor in Autumn 2024 to collaborate with Dr Tracy Helliwell in the School of Education.
Living in the Principal’s house at Bristol brought new challenges including finding a grocery store, navigating a double oven with temperatures in Celsius, and laundering my clothes with a washer that was also a dryer. Each of these challenges served as a reminder of my learning. My stay at Bristol focused my attention on collaborations in teacher educator work with prospective teachers.
In my graduate program I had heard “All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” (Maturana & Varela 1992, p. 27) but I wondered at its meaning in terms of teacher learning. The Bristol symposia and working groups created space for me to revisit this phrase. In a symposium focused on teacher noticing, presenters shared a geometric image and asked attendees to be aware of what we noticed over some minutes. Attendees then shared what they had seen providing occasions for new ways of seeing.
New ways of seeing teacher educator and teacher collaborations were stimulated by a local school. I saw children doing and talking about mathematics. I saw and heard a prospective teacher share her experience of teaching and identify areas in her practice for future action. I listened to my host Dr. Tracy Helliwell debrief with the mentor teacher and the prospective teacher. I noticed how much of the time the prospective teacher spoke and wondered about the thoughts of the mentor teacher and Dr. Helliwell. I became aware of “staying with the details” (Brown & Coles, 2013) as a way of doing mathematics teacher educator work.
Seminars at Bristol involve discussions of noticings and emerging thoughts of attendees in response to presenters. In my presentations over the last 20 years I have asked attendees for their stories. Through the years I was aware that I could notice a theme for a few of the stories but not all. During the Bristol seminars I asked for stories about mathematics learners’ needs, writing research, and relationships in teaching. I left time for questions. Attendees used this time to share noticings and awarenesses. This was unexpected. In America, presentations in my academic contexts were more like showcases. The Bristol seminars were opportunities for the seminar leader and participants to share and to learn.
Due to my background, I treated my first seminar at the British Society for Research in Mathematics Learning as a presentation. I described my experiences of Certainty and Uncertainty in designing instructional activities for prospective mathematics teachers. I heard from several attendees during and following the session. Attendees offered possibilities for my thinking such as whether the experience I relayed was one of certainty or something else (H. Povey, personal communication, November 2, 2024). By my last seminar at Bristol, Exploring and Defining Relational Practice for the School of Education, I was developing a new way of hearing seminar attendees. I tried to ask questions about attendee’s stories and to stay with the detail they shared about relationships. Hearing stories of a prospective Bristol student who shared his nervousness and a child who hid under a table to remain safe in school were stories that contained vital information seminar attendees associated with my descriptions of relationships. At Bristol I was learning how to hear these stories.
By the end of my month, I found the grocery store, made cookies twice using the oven at the Principal’s house, and did my laundry each week. My cookies were not perfect, and I ruined a sweater or two. Yet through Bristol collaborations I became aware of ways of knowing through doing tasks including those in my teacher educator work.
