INVESTIGATING MEDIATION STRATEGIES USED BY EARLY YEARS MATHEMATICS TEACHERS IN MALAWI

Abstract

Based on the sociocultural perspective of the teacher as the main mediating agent in the classroom, the study investigated how teachers work with the four means of mediation; that is, tasks and examples, artefacts, inscriptions, talk and gesture; suggested by the Mediating Primary Mathematics (MPM) framework by Venkat and Askew (2018). The study adopted a qualitative case-study design where the research participants were four teachers from each of the first four classes at a purposively selected school. Data from video-recorded lessons was analysed using the MPM’s approach for lesson analysis whereas the interviews and documents were analysed thematically. The study found that the teachers followed the teachers’ guide for structuring lesson tasks and selected the mediating examples randomly from the learners’ textbooks. The teachers used different artefacts, in particular framed counters for unit counting. The teachers used chalkboard inscriptions for presenting tasks and demonstrating the method to obtain the solution. The teachers’ mediating talk for solving addition problems was mainly based on the ‘combine and count-all’ approach. The teachers’ choice of mediating means was generally influenced by the belief that children learn well by doing. These findings have implications for teaching, curriculum materials as well as teacher education and development. The study contributes to knowledge by providing research findings on teachers’ mediation of mathematics in early years classrooms in Malawi; and contributes to the MPM framework by exemplifying usage of the framework by a single researcher outside a professional development setup within which it was developed and initially used.