ICMI NEWS
Special Edition 2017
Announcement of the recipients of the 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award and
the 2017 Felix Klein Award
Editors:
Abraham Arcavi (ICMI Secretary General); Merrilyn Goos (ICMI Vice
President); Lena Koch (IMU Secretariat, ICMI Administrator)
Contact:
Graphic Design:
Lena Koch
Contents
Announcement of the recipients of the 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award and
the 2017 Felix Klein Award:
The 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award for
outstanding contributions of an individual's theoretically
well-conceived and highly coherent research programme for Terezinha
Nunes
The 2017 Felix Klein Award for life-time achievement in mathematics
education research for Deborah Loewenberg Ball
***************
The 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award for outstanding contributions of an
individual's theoretically well-conceived and highly coherent
research programme for Terezinha Nunes
The Freudenthal Award, with which ICMI honors innovative, consistent,
highly influential and still ongoing programs of research in
mathematics education, is being awarded in 2017 to Professor Terezinha
Nunes, University of Oxford, UK, for her outstanding contribution to
our understanding of mathematical thinking, ist origins and
development.
For more than 35 years now Terezinha Nunes has been researching
children's mathematical learning, as it takes place in formal and
informal settings. The results of her numerous, exemplarily designed
studies combine into an insightful, consistent, and comprehensive
story of the emergence and evolution of mathematical thinking. This
constantly developing account has been inspiring the work of
mathematics education researchers and informing mathematics teachers'
practices all over the world. It has had a major impact on both what
we know about children's learning of mathematics and on how we know
and think about it.
Terezinha Nunes' research has been immensely innovative and
influential from its earliest stages. In one of her first studies, she
documented the mathematical skills of young Brazilian street vendors
who, although almost unschooled and incapable of executing
paper-and-pencil arithmetic tasks, proved impressively proficient in
complex money transactions. Understandings gained through this
research have echoed throughout the mathematics education literature
ever since the project's completion, for almost three decades now.
It was one of those studies that, in the last quarter of the 20th
century, revolutionized our thinking about learning-about its
nature, origins and development. Conducted with David Carraher and
Analucia Schliemann and summarized in their seminal book Street
Mathematics (1993), this research made a decisive contribution to what
is now known as the "situative turn" in the learning sciences at
large, and in mathematics education in particular. Terezinha Nunes'
contribution to this conceptual revolution has been evidenced, among
others, by the widespread use of the term street mathematics and by
the large number of cross-situational and cross-cultural studies on
mathematics learning inspired by her work.
Terezinha Nunes' later research on the development of mathematical
thinking, conducted in Brazil and the UK, spans multiple mathematical
topics, from additive and multiplicative reasoning to fractions,
variables, randomness and probability. She has studied children's
logical reasoning and its role in the learning of mathematics, as well
as problem solving and the way mathematics is being used in science. A
special place in her work has been reserved for research on the
mathematics learning of deaf children and for developing and testing
innovative intervention programs based on insights thus gained. In
parallel to the work of scrutinizing different types of mathematical
thinking and their development, Terezinha Nunes has also
systematically constructed a big picture of this development. As
research findings have accumulated, she has been adjusting and
refining her syntheses. Different versions of these cumulative,
integrative accounts have been disseminated, among others, through her
2000 ICME plenary address, her 1996 book written with Peter Bryant
Children Doing Mathematics, and the 2016 ICME monograph Teaching and
Learning about Numbers in Primary School, which she co-authored with
colleagues.
While forging her stories on children's thinking about numbers,
Terezinha Nunes has been transforming her own thinking as a
researcher. She has come a long way from being a traditionally trained
clinical psychologist, whose research was firmly grounded in
Piaget's ideas about human development, to being inspired by cultural
psychology and the work of Vygotsky and his followers to at least the
same extent. Hers is a special type of synthesis between cognitivist
and sociocultural approaches. Today, she speaks about "mathematics
learning as the socialization of the mind" and claims the utmost
importance of cultural shaping. At the same time, she asserts the
existence of cross-cultural invariants in children's mathematical
thinking. If these two tenets may sometimes appear incompatible, she
argues, it is only because different cultures build on the common
elements to produce forms of mathematical competences diverse enough
to make the cross-cultural invariants almost invisible. Another basic
tenet of her work is that children's quantitative reasoning may and
should be developed independently of, and possibly prior to, their
numerical skills. These and many other of her research-generated
insights on mathematics learning were novel to the mathematics
education community when first announced. Careful to notice phenomena
that have escaped the attention of investigators wedded to the
"deficit model" of research, she portrayed children's mathematics
in unprecedented detail and depth.
Terezinha Nunes' tendency for bridging apparent opposites and
bringing the separate together finds its expression also in her
attempts to improve the practice of teaching mathematics. Not a
typical dweller of the ivory tower of academia, she has always made
sure that her work finds its way to those for whom it was meant in the
first place - educators, parents, and anybody interested in
promoting children's learning. She has been consistently translating
her research generated insights into innovative pedagogies.
Trained as a psychologist, Terezinha Nunes began investigating
children's mathematical thinking because of her professional
interest in human development. Her studies soon began to attract the
attention of mathematics education researchers, leading to her
membership in the International Committee of PME (1986-1990; in
1989-1990 she served as Vice-President of PME) and on editorial boards
of major mathematics education journals, Educational Studies in
Mathematics (1989-1995) and For the learning of mathematics
(2000-2004). Since then, she has been one of the most widely
recognized members of the community of research in mathematics
education. This, however, was not her only professional membership. An
interdisciplinary thinker, who has been investigating children's
evolving reading and writing skills in parallel to her work on
mathematical thinking, Terezinha has enjoyed a prominent status also
among developmental and cultural psychologists. Her insights about
numeracy and about literacy constantly informed and enriched each
other and combined together into a major advancement in our
understanding of human development and learning in general.
Terezinha Nunes began her studies in psychology in her native Brazil
and earned her masters and PhD degrees at City University of New York
(1975, 1976, respectively). She began her academic career in Brazil at
the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the University of
Pernambuco. Later, she moved to the United Kingdom, where she taught
at the Institute of Education, University of London, Oxford Brookes
University and, since 2005, at the University of Oxford. She is now
Professor Emerita at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris
Manchester College, Oxford. Throughout her career, she has completed
tens, if not hundreds of studies, most of which were conducted in
Brazil and in the UK. An exceptionally prolific writer, she has
authored or co-authored more than a dozen books and almost two hundred
journal papers, book chapters and encyclopedia entries in English and
Portuguese. An ardent team player and highly appreciated teacher,
Terezinha Nunes has been an inspiration to her colleagues and to her
many students.
As an outstanding researcher driven by an insatiable passion for
knowing, one who has made a paramount contribution to mathematics
education and is likely to continue adding substantial insights for
years to come, Terezinha Nunes is an eminently deserving recipient of
the Hans Freudenthal Award for 2017.
***************
The 2017 Felix Klein Award for life-time achievement in mathematics
education research for Deborah Loewenberg Ball
The Felix Klein Award, with which ICMI honors the most meritorious
scholars within the mathematics education community, is given in 2017
to Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor
in Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, US. The Felix Klein Award 2017 is awarded to
Professor Ball in recognition of her outstanding contributions and her
leadership role in deepening our understanding of the complexities of
teaching mathematics and in improving the practice of teaching and of
teacher education.
These achievements are grounded in Deborah Ball's firm belief that
research and practice of teaching are co-constitutive and must always
be developed in tandem. Early in her life, Deborah Ball, at that time
an exceptionally talented elementary school mathematics teacher, set
out to investigate what was involved in the work of teaching children
mathematics "for understanding." Her intention was to uncover the
work in order to support the learning of teaching practice. Ever since
then, her ambition has been to contribute in a substantial way to the
project of improving ways in which mathematics teachers support their
students' learning. This goal gave rise to two lines of work, both
of them combining research with development in the domain of teacher
education. The first strand, in which the research element came first,
has been generating studies revolving around the question of what
mathematical knowledge is required for teaching learners. In the
second line of work, related to the practice of education in a more
immediate way, the development of innovative teacher preparation
programs has been combined with research, through which Deborah Ball
has been trying to gain a better grasp of the moment-to-moment
dilemmas with which teachers grapple in the classroom.
The first of these pursuits gave rise to the theory of MKT,
Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, the kind of knowledge that
requires competence in both everyday and academic mathematical
discourses, but is identical to neither. In her multiple studies,
Deborah Ball and her colleagues have been able to identify many unique
features of MKT, and then to corroborate the conjecture about a
correlation between teachers' competence in this special brand of
mathematics and the achievements of their students. With the support
of a group of mathematicians, the theory has been translated into an
instrument for measuring teachers' knowledge of mathematics for
teaching. The MKT project proved highly influential, as evidenced by
the widespread use of the term MKT and by the great popularity of
Deborah Ball's publications on the topic. Her 2008 paper "Content
knowledge for teaching: What makes it special?" co-authored with
Mark Hoover and Geoffrey Phelps Thames, which appeared in the Journal
of Teacher Education, is one example of such a widely read
article.
The second, newer strand of Deborah Ball's work is centered in
TeachingWorks, a national organization she established at the
University of Michigan to help in improving teachers' preparation
and to define "a professional threshold for entry to teaching."
The mission of the institute is to identify "high-leverage"
teaching practices, that is, those recurring elements of teacher's
classroom activities that are central to what Deborah Ball terms
"the work of teaching." It is also part of the mission to work in
partnerships with others to improve the preparation of teachers. To
this end, Deborah Ball has been carrying in-depth analyzes
of the ways in which mathematics teachers juggle their multiple
classroom tasks, such as interpreting the learner's often
idiosyncratic ways of thinking, gradually transforming the
children's special understandings into more canonical ones, sustaining
equitable learning dialogue and taking care of the emotional
well-being of the students. This line of Deborah Ball's research,
while relatively new, seems to be an attempt to close the circle that
opened with the early reflection on her intuitive efforts, as a
teacher, to identify and to bridge the gap between her own mathematics
and the mathematics of her students. Indeed, this current research
project harks back to Deborah Ball's early publications, such as her
now classical 1993 article "With an eye on mathematical horizon:
Dilemmas of teaching elementary school mathematics", in which
the memorable case of "Sean numbers" helped the author to
highlight challenges of classroom teaching.
Deborah Ball has played multiple leadership roles, and not only within
community of mathematics education but also within that of education
at large, and not only within United States, but internationally. In
all these arenas, hers was a systematic effort to build bridges. Her
years-long work on bringing together research and practice of
mathematics education is just one example of these attempts. Another
expresses itself in her striving for a fruitful collaboration between
the communities of mathematicians and of mathematics educators. In
this later undertaking, she has been acting on her strong belief that
certain differences of opinions on mathematics and on teaching that
arise occasionally between these two communities, far from being an
obstacle, are likely to help in creating a synergetic partnership.
Deborah Ball's achievements as a researcher and a leader have been
recognized nationally and internationally. This recognition is
signaled, among others, by the unprecedented frequency with which her
publications are cited by other authors, by her great popularity as a
speaker, by her multiple roles within ICMI and by her membership
of numerous policy-making or advisory committees, such as the National
Science Board, appointed by President Barack Obama. Whereas her work
is firmly grounded in mathematics education, the recognition of its
outcomes goes well beyond the community of mathematics education. This
is evidenced by Deborah Ball's prestigious membership in the
National Academy of Education and by her current roles as the
President of the American Educational Research Association and as a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Deborah Ball has been an elementary classroom teacher before and
during her studies at Michigan State University, which she completed
in 1988 with a PhD in mathematics education. Upon graduation, she
joined Michigan State University, and in 1996 she was recruited to the
University of Michigan to develop the mathematics education group. She
has been teaching at the University of Michigan ever since then and
also spent over a decade serving as Dean of the School of Education
there.
With more than thirty years of outstanding achievements in mathematics
education research and development, Deborah Ball is a most
distinguished member of mathematics education community and a highly
deserving recipient of 2017 Felix Klein Award.
Editors:
Abraham Arcavi (ICMI Secretary General); Merrilyn Goos (ICMI Vice
President); Lena Koch (IMU Secretariat, ICMI Administrator)
Contact:
abraham...@weizmann.ac.il; m.g...@uq.edu.au; lena.koch@wias-berlin.de
Graphic Design:
Lena Koch
Contents
Announcement of the recipients of the 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award and
the 2017 Felix Klein Award:
The 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award for outstanding contributions of an
individual's theoretically well-conceived and highly coherent
research programme for Terezinha Nunes
The 2017 Felix Klein Award for life-time achievement in mathematics
education research for Deborah Loewenberg Ball
***************
The 2017 Hans Freudenthal Award for outstanding contributions of an
individual's theoretically well-conceived and highly coherent
research programme for Terezinha Nunes
The Freudenthal Award, with which ICMI honors innovative, consistent,
highly influential and still ongoing programs of research in
mathematics education, is being awarded in 2017 to Professor Terezinha
Nunes, University of Oxford, UK, for her outstanding contribution to
our understanding of mathematical thinking, ist origins and
development.
For more than 35 years now Terezinha Nunes has been researching
children's mathematical learning, as it takes place in formal and
informal settings. The results of her numerous, exemplarily designed
studies combine into an insightful, consistent, and comprehensive
story of the emergence and evolution of mathematical thinking. This
constantly developing account has been inspiring the work of
mathematics education researchers and informing mathematics teachers'
practices all over the world. It has had a major impact on both what
we know about children's learning of mathematics and on how we know
and think about it.
Terezinha Nunes' research has been immensely innovative and
influential from its earliest stages. In one of her first studies, she
documented the mathematical skills of young Brazilian street vendors
who, although almost unschooled and incapable of executing
paper-and-pencil arithmetic tasks, proved impressively proficient in
complex money transactions. Understandings gained through this
research have echoed throughout the mathematics education literature
ever since the project's completion, for almost three decades now.
It was one of those studies that, in the last quarter of the 20th
century, revolutionized our thinking about learning-about its
nature, origins and development. Conducted with David Carraher and
Analucia Schliemann and summarized in their seminal book Street
Mathematics (1993), this research made a decisive contribution to what
is now known as the "situative turn" in the learning sciences at
large, and in mathematics education in particular. Terezinha Nunes'
contribution to this conceptual revolution has been evidenced, among
others, by the widespread use of the term street mathematics and by
the large number of cross-situational and cross-cultural studies on
mathematics learning inspired by her work.
Terezinha Nunes' later research on the
development of mathematical thinking, conducted in Brazil and the UK,
spans multiple mathematical topics, from additive and multiplicative
reasoning to fractions, variables, randomness and probability. She has
studied children's logical reasoning and its role in the learning of
mathematics, as well as problem solving and the way mathematics is
being used in science. A special place in her work has been reserved
for research on the mathematics learning of deaf children and for
developing and testing innovative intervention programs based on
insights thus gained. In parallel to the work of scrutinizing
different types of mathematical thinking and their development,
Terezinha Nunes has also systematically constructed a big picture of
this development. As research findings have accumulated, she has been
adjusting and refining her syntheses. Different versions of these
cumulative, integrative accounts have been disseminated, among others,
through her 2000 ICME plenary address, her 1996 book written with
Peter Bryant Children Doing Mathematics, and the 2016 ICME monograph
Teaching and Learning about Numbers in Primary School, which she
co-authored with colleagues.
While forging her stories on children's thinking about numbers,
Terezinha Nunes has been transforming her own thinking as a
researcher. She has come a long way from being a traditionally trained
clinical psychologist, whose research was firmly grounded in
Piaget's ideas about human development, to being inspired by cultural
psychology and the work of Vygotsky and his followers to at least the
same extent. Hers is a special type of synthesis between cognitivist
and sociocultural approaches. Today, she speaks about "mathematics
learning as the socialization of the mind" and claims the utmost
importance of cultural shaping. At the same time, she asserts the
existence of cross-cultural invariants in children's mathematical
thinking. If these two tenets may sometimes appear incompatible, she
argues, it is only because different cultures build on the common
elements to produce forms of mathematical competences diverse enough
to make the cross-cultural invariants almost invisible. Another basic
tenet of her work is that children's quantitative reasoning may and
should be developed independently of, and possibly prior to, their
numerical skills. These and many other of her research-generated
insights on mathematics learning were novel to the mathematics
education community when first announced. Careful to notice phenomena
that have escaped the attention of investigators wedded to the
"deficit model" of research, she portrayed children's mathematics
in unprecedented detail and depth.
Terezinha Nunes' tendency for bridging apparent opposites and
bringing the separate together finds its expression also in her
attempts to improve the practice of teaching mathematics. Not a
typical dweller of the ivory tower of academia, she has always made
sure that her work finds its way to those for whom it was meant in the
first place - educators, parents, and anybody interested in
promoting children's learning. She has been consistently translating
her research generated insights into innovative
pedagogies.
Trained as a psychologist, Terezinha Nunes began investigating
children's mathematical thinking because of her professional
interest in human development. Her studies soon began to attract the
attention of mathematics education researchers, leading to her
membership in the International Committee of PME (1986-1990; in
1989-1990 she served as Vice-President of PME) and on editorial boards
of major mathematics education journals, Educational Studies in
Mathematics (1989-1995) and For the learning of mathematics
(2000-2004). Since then, she has been one of the most widely
recognized members of the community of research in mathematics
education. This, however, was not her only professional membership. An
interdisciplinary thinker, who has been investigating children's
evolving reading and writing skills in parallel to her work on
mathematical thinking, Terezinha has enjoyed a prominent status also
among developmental and cultural psychologists. Her insights about
numeracy and about literacy constantly informed and enriched each
other and combined together into a major advancement in our
understanding of human development and learning in general.
Terezinha Nunes began her studies in psychology in her native Brazil
and earned her masters and PhD degrees at City University of New York
(1975, 1976, respectively). She began her academic career in Brazil at
the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the University of
Pernambuco. Later, she moved to the United Kingdom, where she taught
at the Institute of Education, University of London, Oxford Brookes
University and, since 2005, at the University of Oxford. She is now
Professor Emerita at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris
Manchester College, Oxford. Throughout her career, she has completed
tens, if not hundreds of studies, most of which were conducted in
Brazil and in the UK. An exceptionally prolific writer, she has
authored or co-authored more than a dozen books and almost two hundred
journal papers, book chapters and encyclopedia entries in English and
Portuguese. An ardent team player and highly appreciated teacher,
Terezinha Nunes has been an inspiration to her colleagues and to her
many students.
As an outstanding researcher driven by an insatiable passion for
knowing, one who has made a paramount contribution to mathematics
education and is likely to continue adding substantial insights for
years to come, Terezinha Nunes is an eminently deserving recipient of
the Hans Freudenthal Award for 2017.
***************
The 2017 Felix Klein Award for life-time achievement in mathematics
education research for Deborah Loewenberg Ball
The Felix Klein Award, with which ICMI honors the most meritorious
scholars within the mathematics education community, is given in 2017
to Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor
in Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, US. The Felix Klein Award 2017 is awarded to
Professor Ball in recognition of her outstanding contributions and her
leadership role in deepening our understanding of the complexities of
teaching mathematics and in improving the practice of teaching and of
teacher education.
These achievements are grounded in Deborah Ball's firm belief that
research and practice of teaching are co-constitutive and must always
be developed in tandem. Early in her life, Deborah Ball, at that time
an exceptionally talented elementary school mathematics teacher, set
out to investigate what was involved in the work of teaching children
mathematics "for understanding." Her intention was to uncover the
work in order to support the learning of teaching practice. Ever since
then, her ambition has been to contribute in a substantial way to the
project of improving ways in which mathematics teachers support their
students' learning. This goal gave rise to two lines of work, both
of them combining research with development in the domain of teacher
education. The first strand, in which the research element came first,
has been generating studies revolving around the question of what
mathematical knowledge is required for teaching learners. In the
second line of work, related to the practice of education in a more
immediate way, the development of innovative teacher preparation
programs has been combined with research, through which Deborah Ball
has been trying to gain a better grasp of the moment-to-moment
dilemmas with which teachers grapple in the classroom.
The first of these pursuits gave rise to the theory of MKT,
Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, the kind of knowledge that
requires competence in both everyday and academic mathematical
discourses, but is identical to neither. In her multiple studies,
Deborah Ball and her colleagues have been able to identify many unique
features of MKT, and then to corroborate the conjecture about a
correlation between teachers' competence in this special brand of
mathematics and the achievements of their students. With the support
of a group of mathematicians, the theory has been translated into an
instrument for measuring teachers' knowledge of mathematics for
teaching. The MKT project proved highly influential, as evidenced by
the widespread use of the term MKT and by the great popularity of
Deborah Ball's publications on the topic. Her 2008 paper "Content
knowledge for teaching: What makes it special?" co-authored with
Mark Hoover and Geoffrey Phelps Thames, which appeared in the Journal
of Teacher Education, is one example of such a widely read
article.
The second, newer strand of Deborah Ball's work is centered in
TeachingWorks, a national organization she established at the
University of Michigan to help in improving teachers' preparation
and to define "a professional threshold for entry to teaching."
The mission of the institute is to identify "high-leverage"
teaching practices, that is, those recurring elements of teacher's
classroom activities that are central to what Deborah Ball terms
"the work of teaching." It is also part of the mission to work in
partnerships with others to improve the preparation of teachers. To
this end, Deborah Ball has been carrying in-depth analyzes
of the ways in which mathematics teachers juggle their multiple
classroom tasks, such as interpreting the learner's often
idiosyncratic ways of thinking, gradually transforming the
children's special understandings into more canonical ones, sustaining
equitable learning dialogue and taking care of the emotional
well-being of the students. This line of Deborah Ball's research,
while relatively new, seems to be an attempt to close the circle that
opened with the early reflection on her intuitive efforts, as a
teacher, to identify and to bridge the gap between her own mathematics
and the mathematics of her students. Indeed, this current research
project harks back to Deborah Ball's early publications, such as her
now classical 1993 article "With an eye on mathematical horizon:
Dilemmas of teaching elementary school mathematics", in which
the memorable case of "Sean numbers" helped the author to
highlight challenges of classroom teaching.
Deborah Ball has played multiple leadership roles, and not only within
community of mathematics education but also within that of education
at large, and not only within United States, but internationally. In
all these arenas, hers was a systematic effort to build bridges. Her
years-long work on bringing together research and practice of
mathematics education is just one example of these attempts. Another
expresses itself in her striving for a fruitful collaboration between
the communities of mathematicians and of mathematics educators. In
this later undertaking, she has been acting on her strong belief that
certain differences of opinions on mathematics and on teaching that
arise occasionally between these two communities, far from being an
obstacle, are likely to help in creating a synergetic partnership.
Deborah Ball's achievements as a researcher and a leader have been
recognized nationally and internationally. This recognition is
signaled, among others, by the unprecedented frequency with which her
publications are cited by other authors, by her great popularity as a
speaker, by her multiple roles within ICMI and by her membership
of numerous policy-making or advisory committees, such as the National
Science Board, appointed by President Barack Obama. Whereas her work
is firmly grounded in mathematics education, the recognition of its
outcomes goes well beyond the community of mathematics education. This
is evidenced by Deborah Ball's prestigious membership in the
National Academy of Education and by her current roles as the
President of the American Educational Research Association and as a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Deborah Ball has been an elementary classroom teacher before and
during her studies at Michigan State University, which she completed
in 1988 with a PhD in mathematics education. Upon graduation, she
joined Michigan State University, and in 1996 she was recruited to the
University of Michigan to develop the mathematics education group. She
has been teaching at the University of Michigan ever since then and
also spent over a decade serving as Dean of the School of Education
there.
With more than thirty years of outstanding achievements in mathematics
education research and development, Deborah Ball is a most
distinguished member of mathematics education community and a highly
deserving recipient of 2017 Felix Klein Award.
***************************************************
--
Jerry P. Becker
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
College of Education and Human Services
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
625 Wham Drive / MC 4610
Carbondale, Illinois 62901