MAKING MATHEMATICS PEDAGOGY LEARNERS-FRIENDLY: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

My personal and professional experiences led me to question the ongoing mathematics pedagogy in the secondary schools of Nepal. When I joined a school as a mathematics teacher, I faced a lot of under-achievers in Mathematics. I was perplexed how I could raise their level of understanding in Mathematics. I came to know a lot of lapses that I had performed while being a student of Mathematics during school life and also while being a mathematics teacher in my profession then. The key problem that I saw was the existing pedagogy in the secondary school mathematics classroom. After coming from the UK, I joined MPhil in Kathmandu University, School of Education, where I decided to explore the teachers’ and students’ perceptions on making mathematics pedagogy learners-friendly. With a key research question (How do teachers and students narrate their experiences for ways of making mathematics pedagogy learners-friendly?), I commenced academic research, using narrative inquiry and constructivists’ theory, covering four different secondary schools. Altogether, four mathematics teachers and II four students were interviewed to collect their opinions and perceptions on learners friendly mathematics pedagogy. Learners-friendly mathematics pedagogy was found to be a holistic approach that incorporated multiple components. First, the classroom setting appeared to be one of the important components of learners-friendly mathematics pedagogy, in which the proper arrangements of the physical utilities of the classroom was counted as a must. Second, teaching-learning activities in a learners-friendly mathematics classroom was aligned with students’ centred pedagogy, in which the learners were focused more in terms of their personal and socio-cultural needs and interests. Third, students’ motivation was also focused as the crux of the learners-friendly mathematics pedagogy. Fourth, learning materials to make the pedagogy effective and student- oriented were also reported to be a major component of the learners-friendly mathematics pedagogy. Fifth, assessment of students’ achievement was found to be a part of learners-friendly mathematics pedagogy as it opens up the ways to decide whether the classroom pedagogy moves ahead as per the aims of teaching Mathematics. Sixth, students-teacher relationship, on the other hand, also appeared to be one of the key components of the learners friendly mathematics pedagogy.