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.

In this paper, I examined the use of photo elicitation interviews as a method for gathering data fromparents, whose views are not often investigated in research in early childhood mathematicseducation. The parents shared and discussed photos of their children engaged in mathematics. Thismethod for gathering parents’ views is investigated using Bourdieu’s theoretical lens of the field.The findings suggest both advantages and disadvantages that established rules of the field whichcould interfere with or enhance relationships. Photo-elicited interviews can provide insights intoparents’ knowledge, experiences and views, revealing broader perspectives on mathematicsactivities at home. However, the choice of photos influenced the interview, limiting or silencingparents if they were unable to recognise any mathematics in what the children were doing in aphoto.

This article describes the results of a digital survey of 41 Polish immigrant parents’ views on mathematics activities at home and at preschool as parents’ views potentially provide a range of perspectives on mathematics activities for young children. Parents were asked to describe and justify their views about how children engage with mathematical ideas and nominate activities that children engage in at home and at preschool. When parents justi ed their views about young children and mathematics, they tended to align themselves with the norms and values of the Swedish preschool curriculum. The ndings suggest that parents, like children, are socialised into Swedish preschools. However, this alignment could limit possibilities for broadening perspectives about mathematics education in preschool, which could be available by incorporating input from immigrant parents’ di erent cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In this paper, a methodology is proposed for gaining insights into preservice teachers’ understandings about young children’s mathematics learning. Using data from a Swedish and Norwegian pilot study, it is possible to see how a set of questions about a stimulus photo of children playing with some glass jars provided insights into the preservice teachers’ mathematical and pedagogical understandings. Although the preservice teachers seemed to be able to recognise a range of mathematical activities and respond to children engaging in them, they often gave only implicit, general information. This raises questions about teacher educators’ expectations about whether preservice teachers, at the end of their courses, should be able to provide more explicit descriptions of what children are doing and suggestions for how to develop their mathematical understandings. Information of this kind can inform teacher educators about what could be improved in future mathematics education courses in early years programmes.

This paper describes the results of a survey of Polish immigrant parents’ views on mathematics education in preschool. In alignment with the Swedish preschool curriculum, the results show that parents viewed learning as being connected to play. The parents to a large extent see similar frequency of mathematical activities occurring at preschool and at home. Parents often commented on children’s involvement in collaboration when playing. Swedish preschools’ pedagogical practices about learning through play seem to have been adopted by parents. The findings suggest that parents, like children, can be socialized into the norms and values of Swedish preschools through their children’s attendance of them.

In many countries around the world, young children use different kinds of information and communication technologies (ICT) on a daily basis. In this chapter, the use of games or apps on these technologies is explored in relationship to children’s learning of mathematical thinking. The work of Biesta on education and socialisation is combined with that of Radford on subjectification and objectification to theorise young children’s learning of mathematical thinking. Two Swedish preschool children’s interactions with a balance game on an Interactive Table are analysed to consider the value of this theory and what it says about the affordances of the game.

This article investigates a map-drawing activity in a Swedish preschool from the perspective of how children are positioned as being or becoming mathematicians by the children themselves, the teacher and the researcher. The children positioned themselves as being mathematicians, who were capable of expressing and using their own experiences and skills. The researcher also focused on the children’s expertise and so positioned them as being mathematicians. Nevertheless, there were times when the children acknowledged their need for more skills and knowledge to solve a problem and thus positioned themselves as becoming mathematicians. Similarly, some of the teacher’s questions also focussed on developing children’s mathematics skills, which thus emphasized children’s incompleteness or state as becoming mathematicians. By contrasting the teacher’s role with those of the children and the researcher, it is possible to identify how the teacher affects children’s socialisation and learning through her questioning.

New norms and values introduced into preschools through curricula changes require teachers to adapt their teaching. However, in making adjustments in order to increase children’s agency, teachers can loose sight of how they wield their own power. In this project, a professional development facilitator worked with five Swedish teachers. Although the preschool teachers considered their primary role to be carers who resisted interfering in children’s explorations, the initial analysis suggests that they were wielding considerable power in their interpretations of what was occurring. Consequently, it has become important for the professional development facilitator to unpack with teachers the power that they wield in order to develop their teaching. This project description discusses initial ideas for doing this.

This theoretical paper investigates the relationship between socialisation and mathematics education in Swedish preschools. Socialisation is considered to be the process by which children construct their own childhoods and experiences as a preparation for adulthood. Mathematics education as defined by the curriculum outlines what learning possibilities preschools and the adults working in them should provide to children. The production and reproduction of cultural knowledge as components of socialisation are connected to the global issue of early year’s education and schoolification. I suggest that it is important to discuss how learning of content and subjectivities is a key feature in an investigation of the relationship between socialisations and mathematics education in the Swedish preschool curriculum.

In the Swedish preschool curriculum, it is stated that children’s learning should happen through play. There is also an expectation that children will engage with ICT and be provided with situations that require them to engage with mathematical concepts. Consequently, the object of this research project is to evaluate mathematical games designed for interactive tables in regard to children’s needs and intersts. Four mathematical games are analysed to determine whether they utilise the affordances of the interactive tables in ways that were likely to support preschool children’s possibilities for learning mathematical concepts and language as well as how to interact with each other. This investigation provides information about how the affordances of interactive tables can be utlised to best meet the needs of young children for future design projects.

In Sweden, where almost all children attend preschool, preschools are significant sites of socialisation. Therefore, there is a need to investigate how this socialisation may be affected by implementation of a revised curriculum. The changes in preschool curriculum are an indication of how schoolification is influencing Early Years education. This is because preschool teachers and work teams use the curriculum to plan activities for children who will be socialised by participating in these activities. This article investigates the goals and guidelines in the revised preschool curriculum and considers how an increased emphasis in those related to mathematics may affect the kind of socialisation children could gain. The goals and guidelines support teachers’ pedagogical practices and hence are worth investigating. The concepts of being and becoming are used to consider how the goals and guidelines position children as having or needing to gain norms and values, skills and knowledge. Consequently, they are considered to need to acquire the skills to perform as members of their society or as knowledgeable participants when constructing their everyday lives in preschool. The goals and guidelines related to mathematics emphasise children’s becoming, and thus their incompleteness. This results in less opportunity for teachers to perceive children as having relevant experience and skills to contribute to activities and to produce creative cultural understanding. Consequently, the schoolification of the preschool curriculum through the increased emphasis in the goals and guidelines for school subjects is likely to affect the kinds of activities that preschool teachers plan and provide to children, and thus the kind of socialisation they receive in preschool.