PRISM :: Browsing by Author "Takeuchi, Miwa"

Browsing by Author "Takeuchi, Miwa"

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Open Access
Aesthetic Experience in Teacher Education
(2022-09-23) Lee, Somi; Kim, Beaumie; Sengupta, Pratim; Lock, Jennifer; Clark, Douglas; Takeuchi, Miwa
This study is about how pre/in-service teachers can engage in aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934) through conceptual artmaking in outdoor public spaces. The activity in the study is meant to develop expansive approaches to their disciplinary perspectives. My work arose from a pragmatic concern where teacher candidates in Ontario typically specialize in a particular subject area (e.g., mathematics, sciences, visual arts) during their B.Ed degrees, but then licensed to and are often required to teach in other subject areas in the public school system. To this extent, this study has a critical research question: how can conceptual art making in outdoor public places engage pre/in-service teachers in aesthetic experience through connecting and expanding their disciplinary perspectives? The sub-question is: how does collaborating with university students with different majors further affect this process? My argument includes that art as an embodied learning associated with creative action makings, can positively impact pre/in-service teachers on synthesizing their disciplinary understanding and comprehension through art. I introduce two methodologies, Art-Based Research and Design-Based Research. Both are used to design artistic approaches of educational research and generate theoretical claims for impactful learning practices for pre/in-service teachers. I also illustrate how I used constant comparison from grounded theory as a technique to analyze four types of data that are either discursive or non-discursive. The discursive data includes in-depth interviews after each workshop and field notes and the non-discursive data includes video recordings from the workshops and visual sketches in the field notes. The analysis of the data led to the development of four empirically supported theories: (1) place-based learning and meaningful transformation (Powell, 2020; Springgay & Truman, 2022), (2) expanded approaches to disciplinary perspectives, (Abrahamson & Lindgren, 2022; Ma & Hall, 2018), (3) mode of inquiry: art-based approach to teaching and learning, and (4) connecting everyday experience with schooling (Allen, 2016). This study took place during the global pandemic, in which the COVID-19 has affected people's lives immensely by limiting almost all parts of living situations, predominantly mobility, due to health concerns. The participants used the limitations and a varying degree of governance in the public spaces in Toronto as sources of learning and teaching to increase resilience in education. In this sense, I suggest that an emphasis on place-based and embodied learning (Ma & Hall, 2018) and aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934; Greene, 2001; Grierson, 2017; Schmidt, 2010; Uhrmacher, 2009) can be helpful in designing pedagogical approaches for addressing the gaps in teacher education. Thus, my work can contribute to the growing areas of art-based learning in learning sciences (Sawyer, 2022) as well as the scholarship on expansive pedagogies in art education (Gradle, 2007; Inwood & Kennedy, 2020; Pérez & Libersat, 2016; Powell & Lajevic, 2011).
Open Access
Characteristics of Friends Working Together: Group Work in Linguistically Diverse Mathematics Classrooms
(2017-05) Takeuchi, Miwa; Fowler, Teresa
The influence of friendship on collaboration during mathematics group work has not yet been extensively examined across diverse school settings or pedagogical contexts. This study explores students’ perspectives towards group work, focusing on the relationship between friendship and group work in linguistically and racially diverse classrooms. Our analysis of interview and video data revealed some of the ways in which students preferred working with friends. There are three main areas that students recognized as advantages of working with their friends: a) focusing on the process of problem solving rather than the product, b) gaining emotional support, and c) diversifying and strengthening ideas. From the analysis of video data of friends working together, we observed that students were gradually diversifying ideas by accepting each other’s contributions while also challenging each other’s ideas. There were times when the boundary of ideas was blurred and different ideas were combined. Despite the learning and social benefits of group work, researchers have also raised concerns about unequal distribution of learning opportunities among students. This study suggests the significance of attending to students’ reports regarding the benefits of establishing and maintaining friendships in relation to group work for mathematics learning.
Open Access
Co-creation of Visual Stories as a Transdisciplinary Approach
(2024-09-03) Dadkhahfard, Shima; Takeuchi, Miwa; Roy, Sylvie; Sengupta, Pratim
Through the co-creation of visual stories, this study explored the racialized and gendered bodily experiences of Afghan refugee/forced migrant families in relation to agency within the school context, particularly mathematics classroom. Using arts-based research, I facilitated workshops to evoke conversations around racialized and gendered bodily experiences of Afghan refugee/forced migrant families in the school context. An illustrated story book was used as a mediational tool to underscore the affordances of visuals in the workshops. The data sources included drawings, video recordings of the workshops, and visual field notes taken during the workshops. I conducted a visual discourse analysis of the drawings to examine how visual elements utilized in the illustrated story book helped participants to share their own bodily experiences. Mediational tools are artifacts that can mediate various actions of individuals and can shape both individual and social processes (Esmonde & Booker, 2016; Wertsch, 1998). The visual analysis of the drawings revealed that participants visually expressed their bodily experiences to depict their power and agency (Holland et al., 2001) in the school context. Participants and I illustrated findings from this study in the form of digital illustration. The story of Gol Noor was collaboratively created by the participants and me. It was co-created based on the visual analysis of the participants’ drawings, the narratives shared by participants, my own interpretations as an artist/researcher, and feedback from participants in an iterative cycle. The findings highlighted that (1) participants repurposed the artistic tools and visual elements utilized in the illustrated story book to visually communicate their embodied stories, and (2) participants communicated their experiences through representation of their bodies in relation to their agency in school, particularly focusing on aspects related to their gender and race.
Open Access
Early Years Students’ Relationships with Mathematics
(2016-12-01) Takeuchi, Miwa; Towers, Jo; Plosz, Jennifer
Early years mathematics experiences have been shown to be a significant predictor for students’ school readiness and future mathematics achievement. Previous research also indicates an important connection between emotion and mathematics learning. How do students in early years education in Alberta describe their emotional relationship with mathematics? This article documents the findings of our research focusing on Kindergarten to Grade 2 students. Our analysis showed that many students in the early years, including those at the Kindergarten level, recognized what is considered to be mathematics but mainly associated mathematics with number and numerical operations. The majority reported positive relationships with mathematics, though some described negative relationships with school mathematics learning.
Open Access
Friendships and group work in linguistically diverse mathematics classrooms: Opportunities to learn for English language learners
(Routledge, 2016-06-01) Takeuchi, Miwa
This ethnographic study examined students’ opportunities to learn in linguistically diverse mathematics classrooms in a Canadian elementary school. I specifically examined the contextual change of group work, which influenced the opportunities to learn for newly arrived English language learners (ELLs). Based on analyses of videorecorded interactions, this study revealed a shift in these ELLs’ opportunities to learn from when they worked with teacher-assigned peers to when they worked with friends. In both settings, ELLs tended to be positioned as novices. However, when working with friends, they accessed a wider variety of work practices. In friend groups, ELLs were occasionally positioned as experts and had more opportunities to raise questions and offer ideas. In contrast, when working with teacher-assigned peers, ELLs tended to remain in the position of being helped. In some teacher-assigned groups, interactions were characterized as authoritative, and ELLs’ contributions and ideas were rejected or neglected without relevant justifications or mathematical authority established by their peers. The findings will contribute to ongoing discussions on group work and friendship in linguistically diverse classrooms.
Open Access
“Globalization,” Coloniality, and Decolonial Love in STEM Education
(Oxford University Press, 2022-01-28) Takeuchi, Miwa; Marin, Ananda
From the era of European empire to the global trades escalated after the World Wars, technological advancement, one of the key underlying conditions of globalization, has been closely linked with the production and reproduction of the colonizer/colonized. The rhetoric of modernity characterized by “salvation,” “rationality,” “development,” and nature-society or nature-culture divides underlies dominant perspectives on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education that have historically positioned economic development and national security as its core values. Such rhetoric inevitably and implicitly generates the logic of oppression and exploitation. Against the backdrop of nationalist and militaristic discourse representing modernity or coloniality, counter-voices have also arisen to envision a future of STEM education that is more humane and socioecologically just. Such bodies of critiques have interrogated interlocking colonial domains that shape the realm of STEM education: (a) settler colonialism, (b) paternalism, genderism, and coloniality, and (c) militarism and aggression and violence against the geopolitical Other. Our ways of knowing and being with STEM disciplines have been inexorably changed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which powerfully showed us how we live in the global chain of contagion. What kinds of portrayal can we depict if we dismantle colonial imaginaries of STEM education and instead center decolonial love—love that resists the nature-culture or nature-society divide, love to know our responsibilities and enact them in ways that give back, and love that does not neglect historical oppression and violence yet carries us through? STEM education that posits decolonial love at its core will be inevitably and critically transdisciplinary, expanding the epistemological and ontological boundaries to embrace those who had been colonized and disciplined through racialized, gendered, and classist disciplinary practices of STEM.
Open Access
Grafemos: Design for Complexity Education Based on Maya-Kaqchikel and Western Perspectives
(2022-04) Lam-Herrera, Marilu; Sengupta, Pratim; Shanahan, Marie-Claire; Takeuchi, Miwa
Amid growing interest in the Learning Sciences in issues of ethical and axiological perspectives in educational design, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the literature on complex systems and computational modeling in K-12 education. This work Highlights Guatemala's Non-Western narratives, ethical-historical concerns, educational dignity, and traditional representational Maya practices that informed and re-shaped the design and practice of modeling technologies (computational and non-computational) for complex systems education. This work is informed and advised by the Ixkoj Ajkem Community Council, a Mayan cultural organization that protects the Mayan Weaving Art. I illustrate how teachers engaged in and designed complexity modeling activities for education, integrating traditional ways of life and knowing –while centering dignity and ethical-historical perspectives and concerns with Western practices. My findings illustrate how teachers engaged in Embodied, Computational, and Physical modeling and designed multi-modal representations of interconnectedness in understanding complex, emergent phenomena by centering their traditional and more-than-human epistemologies.
Open Access
Immigrant students’ mathematics learning experiences in Canadian schools
(2015) Takeuchi, Miwa; Towers, Jo
Open Access
Learning elapsed time through afterschool activities
(2015) Takeuchi, Miwa; Coyle, Robin
A teacher in an urban school designed culturally and linguistically relevant lessons on measurement by utilizing students’ timelines on evening activities. The lessons opened up multilayered learning. Students learned about measurement, language and also about their classmates. The lessons also facilitated English language learners’ participation in mathematics lessons.
Open Access
Navigating Figured Worlds: Preservice Teachers’ Understandings of Disability and Inclusion Through Representations
(2021-09) Ostrowdun, Christopher; Lock, Jennifer; Takeuchi, Miwa; Shanahan, Marie-Claire; Burns, Amy Marie; Carrington, Suzanne
Preservice teachers’ understandings of inclusion and disability can significantly shape their practices; they need opportunities to consider their perspectives as part of their teacher training. Yet, teacher education programs seldom have explicit opportunities for such considerations. Using a design-based approach, I iteratively developed and implemented representation tasks within a Bachelor of Education course. I examined how representations in the form of drawings supported preservice teachers in developing their understanding of inclusion and disability. The data sources included individual and collaborative drawings, video recordings of participants creating drawings, and audio recorded interviews with participants after their field experiences. I conducted a visual discourse analysis of the representations and an interaction analysis of video recordings to examine how they understood figured worlds of inclusion and disability. Figured worlds encompass the socially negotiated actors, actions, and outcomes that are valued, and they characterize people’s orientations to daily life (Holland et al., 1998). The findings show how participants progressed through (1) developing an individual understanding, (2) a collaborative understanding, and (3) a situated understanding of inclusion and disability. Individually, the participants held multiple, sometimes simultaneous, conceptions of disability and inclusion. Further, social positions and hierarchies were often conveyed through the drawings. In participants’ collaborative drawings, forces such as instructor appeasement, time constraints, and individual priorities competed in influencing their representations. During field experiences, the participants navigated complexities of school cultures, other teachers, and students in considering ways to understand and implement inclusion. As well, the participants had to author themselves and their roles as emerging teachers within figured worlds of inclusion and disability. Implications from this research include a need to support preservice teachers in navigating multiple figured worlds, the adoption of a critical disability studies lens in teacher education, and how representations can be used as a pedagogical tool. Furthermore, the research supports using representations as a methodological tool to studying figured worlds, proposes a framework to understand interactions, and offers connections between the fields of the Learning Sciences and Disability Studies.
Open Access
Non-dominant students’ and their parents’ mathematical practices at home.
(2015) Takeuchi, Miwa
In response to the global mobility of populations, there have been growing international interests in mathematics learning and teaching in linguistically and ethnically diverse classrooms. In order to better support mathematics learning at school for non-dominant students, I examined informal mathematical knowledge they accessed at home. Focusing on Filipino immigrant mothers and their children in Japanese schools, this paper highlights how these mothers’ informal mathematics knowledge attached to everyday practices can influence their children’s development of mathematical literacy at school.
Open Access
Pathways of Change Agents: A Pedagogical Possibility for Critical Consciousness Development in Youth
(2021-09-20) Cho, Suyeon; Lund, Darren; Takeuchi, Miwa; Field, James
In a society stratified by race, gender, religion, disability, and many other social positions, people have differential and unequal life opportunities. A pluralistic multicultural approach fails to recognize this systemic injustice and even contributes to perpetuating it by not addressing this problem. Therefore, acknowledging and challenging the structural factors that oppress the marginalized and minoritized people is imperative to achieving a more just and better society. This qualitative case study aimed to understand how to promote critical consciousness through an educational practice at schools. Accordingly, I examined a junior-high elective in Calgary, the Agents of Change, in which students identified a social problem that affected their communities and took action against it, with the focus on how this course facilitated the development of critical consciousness in youth. I interviewed the teacher and two students who engaged in the course for the 2019-2020 school year and investigated the course-related documents created by the participants. The findings demonstrate the development of critical consciousness in the students, which include: gaining a more contextual understanding of social problems; establishing a specific concept of activism based on their own life experiences and expertise; obtaining a stronger sense of self-confidence to bring about positive social changes; and acknowledging more social justice communities around them. How the teacher strove to facilitate the students’ growth and what contextual factors around the school and the curriculum were considered are also discussed in detail.
Open Access
Pioneering STEM Education for Pre-Service Teachers
(International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy, 2016-11-01) Francis, Krista; Friesen, Sharon; Preciado-Babb, Armando Paulino; Takeuchi, Miwa; Alonso-Yañez, Gabriela; Gereluk, Dianne T.
While there have been numerous initiatives to promote and recruit students into postsecondary studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) around the world, traditional programs of studies for both K to 12 school and teacher education still lack an integrative approach to these disciplines. Addressing this concern, the Werklund School of Education of the University of Calgary started to offer a course in STEM education for the undergraduate Bachelor of Education program. The purpose of this article is to document the first iterations of this course. We draw from narratives of four instructors, including the coordinator of the course, and administrators who were actively involved in creation and approval of the course. We describe the course and its connection to the philosophy of the program, examine the context in which this course was conceived—including both national and provincial policy—and address some challenges and possibilities experienced by administrators, instructors and students during the creation and implementation of the course.
Open Access
Professional development as discourse change: Teaching mathematics to English learners
(2011) Takeuchi, Miwa; Esmonde, Indigo
This study examines teacher learning from the perspective of cultural–historical activity theory, which emphasizes the creation of new environments and new artefacts. This study focuses on elementary school teachers' learning over the course of professional development (PD) sessions for equitable mathematics teaching. Within the PD, the teachers created a student project that investigated linguistic diversity in the school community. Thematic analysis reveals that teachers' discourse relating to teaching mathematics to English language learners (ELLs) changed after the implementation of the inquiry project. More specifically, the discourse shifted from focusing on ELLs' barriers and challenges to highlighting what ELLs can do. This shift was coupled with a change in the classroom mathematics learning environment.
Open Access
The situated multiliteracies approach to classroom participation: English language learners’ participation in classroom mathematics practices
(2015) Takeuchi, Miwa
Guided by sociocultural theory and the theory of multiliteracies, learning is perceived as a shifting participation in practices, which is mediated by multiple physical and symbolic tools. Drawing on the situated multiliteracies approach, which integrates these two theories, the purpose of this ethnographic research is to examine the participation of English language learners (ELLs) in mathematics practices in an urban Canadian classroom. This study describes ELLs’ successful participation in classroom mathematics practices in relation to the context that supported their participation. I highlight the teacher’s use of multiple languages and physical and symbolic tools, along with her affirmation of students’ identities as multimodal users. The finding from this study calls for broadening the definition of language in content-area classrooms and for embracing identities created through classroom interactions as an integral part of learning.
Open Access
Social identities and opportunities to learn: Student perspectives on group work in an urban mathematics classroom
(2009) Esmonde, Indigo; Brodie, Kanjana; Dookie, Lesley; Takeuchi, Miwa
In this article, the authors investigate group work in a heterogeneous urban high school mathematics classroom. Two questions are explored: How do students describe cooperative group work in their mathematics class? How do students describe the way their socially constructed identities influence the nature of their group interactions in mathematics classrooms? The authors present a case study of the ways in which race, gender, and other social identities might influence the nature of group work in reform-oriented high school mathematics classrooms. The analysis, based on 14 interviews with high school students, focused on students perceptions of group work and their theories about when cooperative groups work well and when they do not. Students named interactional style, mathematical understanding, and friendships and relationships as the most influential factors. Using an analytic lens informed, in part, by critical race theory, the authors highlight the racialized and gendered nature of these factors.
Open Access
The social organization of mathematics classrooms and English language learners’ opportunities to participate
(2010-06) Takeuchi, Miwa
In this paper, I discuss the significance of classroom organization in English Language Learners’ (ELLs) opportunities to participate in mathematics classrooms through a review of relevant contemporary literature. In particular, I will focus on the following areas of classroom organization: language organization, instructional organization, and discourse organization. By highlighting the relationship between classroom organization and English language learners’ opportunities to participate in the mathematics classroom, I will provide insight into when and under which contexts ELLs are acknowledged (or not) with their existing resources.
Open Access
Soil Camp: Learning with the Land Toward Refugee Integration, Diversity, and Sustainability through Community Partnerships 2020-21
(2021-09-27) Takeuchi, Miwa; Chowdhury, Anita; Kopparla, Mahati; Thraya, Sophia; Yuen, Jenny; Czuy, Kori; Mambo, Tatenda; Olson, Rod; Sobh, Hannan; Fakih, Ahlam
Open Access
Students’ Identities and Collaboration in Mathematics Group Work
(2018-05-29) Valera, Silvana; Takeuchi, Miwa
In this study, we examined how students’ different identities, especially gender and students’ relationship with mathematics, influenced leadership and group work in math classrooms. This study took place in two linguistically and racially diverse middle schools in Canada. We collected student surveys, video-recorded group work interactions, and individual video-mediated interviews. We analyzed four mixed-gender groups and 12 interviews. Our analysis revealed that girls took on leadership roles equally as boys. Instead, we found that those who demonstrated a positive math identity tended to take on leadership roles in the group and those who demonstrated a negative math identity did not. We also identified how culturally-constituted gender norms can influence collaboration. Two girls expressed their preference to work with girls. Their preference influenced the way in which they interacted in the group with a boy. Our results complicated the role of gender identities in math by examining its intersection with other identities. We highlight the importance for educators and parents to collectively develop positive math identities among all students to in turn foster leadership and agency in math learning. We also question the common school practice where students are socialized into the unsustainable norm that boys and girls work separately.
Open Access
Supporting Multimodal Literacies in Early Learning Settings: A Case Study of Two Child Care Centres in Alberta
(2022-06) Fischer, Rhonda; Lenters, Kimberly Ann; Roessingh, Hetty; Takeuchi, Miwa
In early learning settings, multiple modes of communication are used to help young children convey meaning. These modes, or multimodal literacies, include signs, images, gestures, sounds, speech, movements, and actions. In this doctoral research, I explored how early learning and childcare educators support multimodal literacies in young children. Using a multiple case study, I utilized video walk-throughs of eight different educator playrooms, interviews with early childhood educators, and pedagogical documentation collected from educators to further my understanding of how multimodal literacies are supported in early childhood settings. The findings of this study revealed that educators conceptualize multimodal literacies differently; however, they include agency, embodiments, intentionality, and play as key aspects of children’s multimodal literacies. Conceptualization and understanding of the multiliteracies pedagogy are also examined. The findings also showed that educators of young children use multiple strategies to support multimodal literacies including pedagogical documentation, responsive environments and a co-inquiry model of noticing, naming, and nurturing. Lastly, my findings reveal that educator participation and finding a balance between supporting play and ideas and following children’s lead in play is critical in supporting multimodal literacies.