What Does Understanding Mathematics Mean for Teachers?: Relationship as a Metaphor for Knowing

by Yuichi Handa

Overview

This book opens up alternative ways of thinking and talking about ways in which a person can "know" a subject (in this case, mathematics), leading to a reconsideration of what it may mean to be a teacher of that subject.

In a number of European languages, a distinction is made in ways of knowing that in the English language is collapsed into the singular word know. In French, for example, to know in the savoir sense is to know things, facts, names, how and why things work, and so on, whereas to know in the connaître sense is to know a person, a place, or even a thing—namely, an other— in such a way that one is familiar with, or in relationship with this other. Primarily through phenomenological reflection with a touch of empirical input, this book fleshes out an image for what a person’s connaître knowing of mathematics might mean, turning to mathematics teachers and teacher educators to help clarify this image.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781136870521
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Series:	ISSN
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Yuichi Handa is Assistant Professor of Mathematics, California State University, Chico.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1: Introduction to a Phenomenon

1.9: A Tangent Prior to the Rise (and Run)

2: Relationship As Reciprocity: Grace

3: A Bringing Forth Of Self: Will

4: Relationship as Interest

5: "Doing" Mathematics and Its Relation to the Life Path of Being a Mathematics Teacher/Educator

An Epilogue in Two Parts

Part 1: Returning to the Episode of the Straitjacket

Part 2: Relationship as a Returning: Going Past "Understanding"

Appendix: A Narrativized "Methodology"

References