Educational Studies in Mathematics. In this new zone, students independently organize their thinking about mathematical concepts and ideas. An interpretative case study of seven middle grade students is presented to support this contention. The case study describes the strategies and procedures students employed while solving mathematical problems and documents students' oral and written thought processes through interview protocols and writing samples. The position that students' mathematical understanding is further developed through writing as a communicative tool, while taking advantage of mediated social practices, is discussed to make clear the rationale for introducing a new learning zone.
Daily journals connect mathematics to real life.
This article describes a journal-writing project developed in a fifth grade, total inclusion classroom, and specifies the major features of the writing project, including the framework used to assess student learning. Action in Teacher Education. Abstract Recent demographic trends in American education have reaffirmed the need to teach prospective teachers about social justice issues such as race, class, and disability. With this goal in mind, fourteen members of the Boston College Teacher Education faculty and three administrators engaged in a year-long series of conversations over the meaning of social justice. A sub-group of faculty, including the authors, studied these conversations.