In this paper, I discuss how using two different data collection methods affect the outcomes of research related to parents’ views on mathematics education. The methods were online surveys and photo-elicitation interviews. The impact of these methods on the outcomes of the study is described using Bruner’s narrative construction. Although the data collection methods enabled parents to describe, share and discuss their children’s engagement in mathematics activities at home and in early childhood institutions, the contexts in which the narratives were produced gave different insights into individual and societal views. Reflections on how the methods provide a foundation for discussions about how data collection can affect what can be said about parents’ knowledge, experiences and views. This has implications for future research on parents’ views about mathematics education for young children.

This study focuses on a discussion between parents and preschool teachers about mathematics education for young children. Data were gathered through focus group interviews, where participants' own photographs were the stimuli for the interviews. Bruner's narrative construction was used to identify how parents' and teachers' views about valued mathematics education were expressed. The results indicate that participants had different roles in children's mathematics education, and these roles contributed to only some views being valued. Preschool teachers' knowledge about appropriate pedagogical practices tended to take precedence, but parents could sometimes disrupt the teachers' presentation of their views, leading to different interactions. The findings indicate that although the Norwegian early childhood curriculum requires collaboration, achieving it may be difficult.

Immigrant parents' views about mathematics education are rarely investigated, yet these are likely to affect their relationship to early childhood education and care (ECEC) and potentially their adopted country. In this study, Polish parents, who had immigrated to Norway, were surveyed about their views about mathematics education for young children, including what was made available in ECEC institutions in Poland and in Norway. We investigated whether the responses showed that parents' views about what is mathematics in early childhood and how it should be taught or learnt could be related to parents' considerations of the power and authority linked to their position as immigrants. The results have implications for multicultural ECEC and policy makers.

Due to the pandemic situation in 2020 the ERME summer school (YESS10) was designed for an online format using a conference system. Our design choices were based on previous experiences with YESS and the use of the research pentagon as a tool to think about research. This paper elaborates theoretically and empirically the specification of the concept of instrumental orchestration of the pentagon use through its rhythmic implementation into the summer school. Research results indicate that this specification had two main effects: The students described their instrumentation of the pentagon as a structuring tool in various ways. The most relevant pentagon use for the students' experience of growing expertise was listening to and observing how the others used the pentagon.

Due to the pandemic in spring 2020 the Young ERME Summer School (YESS) of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME) switched to using a synchronic online conference system. Two of seven thematic working groups (TWG5, TWG7) were designed to support students’ learning and development by mutually giving and getting feedback to individual presentations of research projects. In this liminal virtual space (Rouzie, 2001) however the usual way of joining attention in teaching/learning (Shvarts & Abrahamson, 2019) where the sensory motor system of the body is at play is reduced to voicing, hearing, sharing screens mediated by technology. How this disembodied environment could meet the students’ needs, was our principal design issue. Two design elements were implemented: the research pentagon, a tool to structure and reflect research with respect to research aims, objects, questions, situations and methods (Bikner-Ahsbahs, 2019), and building pairs of critical friends, prior to the school to ensure mutual in-depth feedback. We organised each of 10 sessions by a (linear) sequence of five types of pentagon-use in the TWGs: presenting own research, critical friend’s feedback, expert’s feedback, peer feedback and listening to peers' giving and getting feedback. According to Lefebvre (1991; 2004) space is socially constructed developing over time, where space, time and energy are interrelated by rhythm, the latter being bodily founded. Rhythm is created by repetition in time and space with variations. Thus, each session was shaped by a linear rhythm of pentagon-use, which was cyclically repeated in the course of the school. This third paper employs rhythmanalyses to answer two research questions: How were the rhythmically organised sessions experienced, and how was this related to students’ efforts? Interview data were used to analyse each students’ experience of rhythm, then the experiences of each type of pentagon-use was compared across all the students. Repeated references to the pentagon related to various research topics resulted in the surprising fact that listening to the peers’ giving and getting feedback was essential for the students’ learning and development. It is the investment of effort that together with the experience of growing knowledge seemed to empower the students (Ernest, 2002). This can be explained by the concept of thinking space (Perret-Clermont, 2004) as the virtual space, socially constituted by the rhythm of varying pentagon-uses across research realms in the students’ interactions, has provided resources that the students experienced as crucial for their epistemic inquiry in research.

References:

Bikner-Ahsbahs, A. (2019). The research pentagon: A diagram with which to think about research. In G. Kaiser & N. Presmeg (Eds.), Compendium for Early Career Researchers in Mathematics Education (pp. 153–180). Cham (Switzerland): Springer.

Ernest, P. (2002). Empowerment in mathematics education. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 15(1), 1–16.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published 1974)

Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis. Space, Time and Everyday Life. (S. Elden & G. Moore, Trans.). London: Continuum. (Original work published 1992)

Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (2004).. Thinking spaces of the young. In A.-N. Perret-Clermont, C. Pontecorvo, L. Resnick, T. Zittoun, & B. Burge (Eds.). Joining society: Social interaction and learning in adolescence and youth (pp. 3–10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rouzie, A. (2001). Electronic discourses in a graduate seminar: MOO conferences as liminal discursive spaces. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (52nd, Denver, March 14-17, 2001).

Shvarts, A., & Abrahamson, D. (2019). Dual-eye-tracking Vygotsky: A microgenetic account of a teaching/ learning collaboration in an embodied-interaction technological tutorial for mathematics. Learning Culture and Social Interaction 22, Article 100316.

This thesis investigates parents’ views on mathematics education for young children at home and in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) institutions in Sweden and Norway. The curricula documents for ECEC highlight the importance of collaboration between teachers and parents for children’s learning and development. However, the views of parents on the education of young children are seldom explored in research. The assumption that parents and other family members can contribute to children’s mathematics education is a fundamental assumption in the current project. The narratives of parents of their experiences with young children in mathematics education were analysed to identify answers to the following overarching research questions. how can parents’ views on mathematics activities for young children be identified? what do parents’ value in mathematics education for young children? and what might influence parents’ views on mathematics education? Parents’ views were investigated by collecting data from online surveys of Polish parents living in Sweden and through photo-elicitation focus group interviews with Norwegian parents. The narratives that were produced from these two data collections provided different insights into parents’ views on mathematics education for young children which have to do with the relationship between parents’ individual views and wider societal views. The findings indicate that counting was viewed as important for young children, and everyday life experiences were considered an appropriate means of introducing them to mathematical ideas. Many of the parents emphasised their role in children’s mathematics learning and its impact on how the children engaged with mathematics at home. The findings also indicate that parents’ views on mathematics education are influenced by wider societal expectations connected to ECEC pedagogical practices in mathematics education. The implications of this research include an understanding of the kinds of opportunities there are for parents to contribute to the introduction of mathematics education to ECEC. Nevertheless, the research results also show that collaboration vibetween parents and teachers can be challenging because of the different nature of their roles. Consequently, one outcome of this research is the identification of a need for further research into the complexity of collaboration as this relates to the negotiation of different understandings of pedagogy, mathematics and roles and responsibilities in children’s learning of mathematics.

Based on the assumption that families are children’s first educators, the focus of this chapter is on the values parents hold about mathematics for young children at home. The data were collected from nine Norwegian parents through photo-elicitated focus group interviews, where the parents’ own photos were used as stimuli for the interviews. The findings reveal that the parents valued their children learning numbers, counting skills, early measuring concepts and use of money. The different mathematics skills were described with examples of the support that they provided their children, and information about what they considered to be the stages in the development of these skills. The analysis was done using a narrative approach to identify how parents saw their children authoring, sense-making, collaborating, and using non-verbal communication which gave insights into the values they held.

The focus of this study is on how parents and teachers negotiate what is valuable as mathematics education for young children in photo-elicitation focus group interviews (PEIs) with two Norwegian parents and three teachers about photos they had taken of children's mathematics activities at home and barnehage[1]. 

In early mathematics education research, there are many studies about engaging parents in their children's learning (e.g., LeFevre et al., 2010; Missall, Hojnoski, Caskie, & Repasky, 2015). Yet, parent-teacher discussions remain connected to what is happening in the barnehage and rarely include input about mathematics activities at home. According to Foucault, power and knowledge are related in that for power to be exerted certain knowledge needs to be accepted as more valuable than other knowledge, and for knowledge to be accepted as more valuable power will have been exerted. For Foucault, power is fluctuating between people as knowledge comes to be seen as more valuable. When people use highly valued knowledge, they exert power by using this knowledge to describe how something "is", as a truth statement (Gordon, 1980). Therefore, there is a need to understand how power and knowledge play out in the acceptance of particular views about mathematics education as being more valuable. Parents and teachers use their knowledge and experiences to tell narratives about mathematics education for young children. However, the flow of power between parents and teachers will affect which of those narratives are considered more valuable. 

To respond to the research question on how in the interactions do parents' and teachers' views about mathematics education come to be valued? It was necessary to provide opportunities for parents and teachers to talk about mathematics education. Consequently, it was decided to use PEIs. The interviews were held at the barnehage, lasted for 45 minutes and audio-recorded. The data analysis was undertaken using Bruner's narrative construction. Bruner (1991) stated that when people talk, they tend to relate events and activities to earlier experiences, where the personal view is constructed and reconstructed through social interactions. In interactions, parents and teachers roles provide them with the opportunity to interpret other views of mathematics education. In the analysis, I highlight how power and knowledge fluctuate to exert as views as more or less valuable. 

The results show that the teachers acted as a group, where their professional roles contributed to them framing knowledge about mathematics education as more valuable than those told by parents. Teachers drew of the knowledge of outside authorities (e.g. digital apps developed by a university or goals in the curriculum) to reinforce their views that certain ICT practices had higher status. In this way, they have reduced the potential input of parents' views into considering what children did at home as valuable mathematics.

The results suggest that power and knowledge fluctuated between parents and teacher and allowed to exemplify how the dominant view of mathematics education is exercised. 

 [1] Barnehage is the Norwegian term which label institutions for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in Norway, for 1–5 year-old children.