[Maths-Education] Re: PLATINUM book published

[Barbara Jaworski]

Hello again everyone.  Please forgive another posting.  However, some people have told me they cannot open the link I sent to the PLATINUM book.
I am therefore sending a new link, with my apologies.
Do get in touch if you have problems in linking.
Best wishes
Barbara

https://munispace.muni.cz/library/catalog/view/2132/5995/3467-1/0#preview

From: Barbara Jaworski
Sent: 09 February 2022 10:33
To: maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Cc: Yuriy Rogovchenko <yuriy.rogovchenko at uia.no>; Josef Rebenda <rebenda at vutbr.cz>; A Heck <A.J.P.Heck at uva.nl>
Subject: PLATINUM book published


Dear Colleagues

PLATINUM, an EU Erasmus+ project has come to an end.

We celebrate the conclusion of PLATINUM with the publication of our (open access) book addressing all aspects of the project.



The book is:

Inquiry in University Mathematics Teaching and Learning

The PLATINUM Project



Edited by Ines Gomez-Chacon, Reinhard Hochmuth,

Barbara Jaworski, Josef Rebenda,

Johanna Ruge, and Stephanie Thomas



The book focuses on university mathematics teaching from inquiry perspectives.

It presents our theoretical perspectives

  *   a three-layer model of inquiry, involving

     *   Inquiry in mathematics with students
     *   Inquiry into teaching by teachers and researchers
     *   Research inquiry building on data from across the project and promoting professional development of teachers.

  *   and theory of Communities of Inquiry and Critical Alignment.

It focuses on the practical side of teaching development in which university teachers work together in inquiry communities to explore new ways of working and develop new knowledge and understanding.

Particularly the book incudes a set of case studies, one from each of the eight partners presenting their developmental work related to the project and so illuminating the whole process of developing in inquiry ways. One highlight of the book is a focus on teaching units and associated inquiry-based mathematical tasks in a range of mathematical topics.



The book is open access available in PDF.

The DOI of the book  https://doi.org/10.5817/CZ.MUNI.M210-9983-2021<https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.5817%2FCZ.MUNI.M210-9983-2021&data=04%7C01%7Ca.j.p.heck%40uva.nl%7C51f113db532e473e997108d9e822a8d2%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C0%7C0%7C637796057831133498%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=zjkFZG2H17MoG9w7RibbBrqClqBWN6Tg%2BUx%2FyKelugc%3D&reserved=0>


We are very pleased to include a Foreword by Michele Artigue (Diderot University, Paris) appended below.

We invite you to share in our pleasure with the book and perhaps to get involved yourself in inquiry-based learning and teaching in university mathematics

All very good wishes
Barbara

Emeritus Professor B Jaworski
Mathematics Education Centre
Loughborough University
Loughborough
LE11 3TU


Foreword to the book:
This  book  reports  on  the  work  carried  out  within  the  Erasmus+  PLATINUM
project by eight European universities from seven countries: the University of Agder, in
Kristiansand, Norway-the coordinator of the project-the University of Amsterdam
in The Netherlands, Masaryk University and Brno University of Technology in Czech
Republic,  Leibniz  University  Hannover  in  Germany,  the  Complutense  University  of
Madrid in Spain,  Loughborough University in the UK, and Borys Grinchenko Kyiv
University in Ukraine.
In this 21st century, projects aimed at studying and disseminating inquiry-based
approaches in the teaching of STEM disciplines in primary and secondary education
have  proliferated  in  Europe,  benefiting  from  the  impulse  of  the  publication  of  the
Rocard's  report  in  2007.
However,  university  mathematics  teaching  has  remained
mainly  traditional,  especially  in  the  first  university  years,  crucial  for  the  students'
orientation and retention.  As the authors point out
Considerable  evidence  shows  that  the  learning  of  mathematics  widely  is  highly  pro-
cedural and not well adapted to using and working with mathematics in science and
engineering and the wider world; also that students learn to reproduce mathematical
procedures in line with tests and examinations, rather than developing a relational, ap-
plicable, creative view of mathematics that they can use more widely.  The PLATINUM
project was set up to move this situation, with the aim of developing an inquiry-based
approach  towards  the  teaching  and  learning  of  university  mathematics  and  for  the
development  of  an  international  community  of  university  mathematics  lecturers  who
practice,  explore  and  encourage  others  to  use  inquiry-based  teaching  approaches  in
teaching mathematics.  (p. 7)
The  consortium  partners  were  well  aware  that  they  were  facing  a  major  challenge
as  university  teaching  conditions,  particularly  in  the  first  university  years,  are  not
conducive to inquiry-based practices: courses gathering large numbers of students with
diverse backgrounds and professional projects, loaded curricula to be covered in a short
period of time, etc., not to mention the lack of pedagogical and didactic preparation
and experience of such practices for the majority of university mathematics lecturers.
The way the consortium partners organised themselves to meet this challenge is
particularly  interesting.   They  have  adopted  a  broad  and  flexible  conceptualisation
of IBME (Inquiry-Based Mathematics Education), referring rather to definitions such
as that proposed by Dorier and Maaß in the Encyclopedia of Mathematics Educa-
tion than the more demanding characterisations proposed for Inquiry-Based Oriented
(IBO)  practices  in  the  United  States  where  such  practices  seem  more  developed  in
Rocard, M., Cesrmley, P., Jorde, D., Lenzen, D., Walberg-Herniksson, H., & Hemmo, V. (2007).
Dorier, J.-L. & Maaß, K. (2020).  Inquiry-based mathematics education.  In S. Lerman (Ed.),
Encyclopedia of mathematics education (2nd ed., pp. 384-388).  Springer Verlag.
mathematics university courses.  And they have created tools, especially spidercharts,
providing criteria for assessing the degree of inquiry involved in student tasks and their
management.
They also formed mixed teams combining a diversity of expertise, those of aca-
demic mathematicians and mathematics education specialists, and built the concep-
tual  foundations  of  their  project  by  positioning  all  actors,  not  only  students,  in  an
inquiry-based learning posture.  The conceptual model which is described in detail in
Chapter 2 is, in fact, made up of three nested levels.  At the first level, inquiry concerns
the mathematics at play in the classroom (lectures, tutorials or other devices); at the
second level, it concerns teaching processes, pedagogical and didactic choices and their
effects; at the third level, inquiry concerns the entire developmental process in which participants reflect on practices in the other two  layers,  and  gather,  analyse,  and  feed-back  data  to  inform  practice  and  develop knowledge in practice.  (p. 20)
Thus Communities of Inquiry were formed which supported the work and professional
development of their members, and were themselves supported by the collective work
of the consortium as Chapter 7 and the various case studies show (see for example
Chapters 14 and 15).
In the European IBME projects I have been involved in,  the collective produc-
tion  of  resources  in  the  form  of  inquiry-based  tasks  and  teaching  units  has  always
been  an  important  component.   This  is  also  the  case  in  PLATINUM  and  I  partic-
ularly  appreciated  the  diversity  of  the  resources  produced.   As  far  as  students  are
concerned,  they  address  many  mathematical  domains-complex  numbers,  functions
of one or more variables, differential equations and dynamical systems, linear algebra,
geometry, statistics and numerical analysis-teaching aimed at future mathematicians
and mathematics teachers, but also very often service mathematics courses, a sector
where,  as  underlined  in  Chapter  8,  IBME  and  mathematical  modelling  are  closely
linked.  They also show that it is possible to engage in inquiry-based practices without
revolutionising one's teaching, that many ordinary tasks, if reformulated, can engage
students in more conceptual work and bring them into the spirit of inquiry aimed at.
Another  interesting  and  original  dimension  of  this  project  is  the  attention  paid
to students with special needs and the difficulties they may encounter in the different
phases of an inquiry process.  Chapter 4, which is very informative, is devoted to this
dimension.   It  specifies  the  forms  that  these  difficulties  may  take  according  to  the
students' profiles and also makes many practical suggestions.  Chapter 6 devoted to
the creation of teaching units for students' inquiry explains the principles of Universal
Design for Learning, "a methodology adopted by PLATINUM partners to strive for
an inclusive learning environment reaching the needs of as many students as possible"
(p. 118), and Chapter 12 provides an insightful illustration of the use of these design
principles.  There is no doubt that the work carried out in the PLATINUM project
should help us to make IBME more inclusive.
I enjoyed reading the pages of the pre-final manuscript I received.  I appreciated
its structure, the eight chapters in Parts 1 and 2 which present the project in a very
detailed way, its origin, its long maturation, its implementation, its conceptual basis
and the ingenious methodological tools developed,  connecting these to the six main
intellectual outputs structuring the project.  I also very much appreciated the eight
chapters in Part 3 where each partner presents in great detail one or two case studies
and analyses them with great intellectual honesty.  In these case studies, the authors
also  make  clear  how  digital  tools-both  educational  mathematical  software  already
used in secondary education and professional tools used by mathematicians, and com-
munication tools-have supported the implementation of inquiry-based approaches in
their institution, and how they have also helped teams adapt to the new constraints
due to the pandemic situation.
There is no doubt in my mind that PLATINUM represents an important milestone
for  the  evolution  of  practices  in  university  mathematics  education.   It  shows  that
this  evolution  is  possible  if  it  is  thought  of  as  a  progressive  dynamic,  adapted  to
the contexts, and carried out by communities combining a diversity of expertise and
seeing themselves as communities of inquiry.  I hope that this book will be a source of
inspiration for many academics.

Mich`ele Artigue
Paris Diderot University, France