Analyzing the socio-cultural values influencing the development of mathematics teaching skills of open and distance learning pre-service teachers

Abstract

The article is based on the study that intended to document the social and cultural values that influence the  development of mathematics teaching skills of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) pre-service teachers. With the lack of face-to-face tuition that is prevalent in formal teacher education, ODL pre-service teachers lack  models of exemplary practices to model their practicum teaching. The results from archival documents,  e-mail correspondence and telephonic interviews revealed that passiveness of African learners to adults ideas, which is a traditional way of childrens respect for adults, filtered into the mathematics classrooms of the  pre-service teachers. Such passiveness limited the full implementation of constructivist tenets in the  pre-service teachers’ classrooms. These results can provide general teacher education insight into ways of reducing pre-service teacher’s research-practice gap of implementing reform pedagogies in the mathematics classroom.

Keywords: Conceptions, constructivism, reform teaching, socio-cultural, ODL.