Conference overview - International Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME)

*note* I will attempt to use the following post to link to future elaborations of each individual session

I've had an extremely busy, but absolutely amazing, month.  I began the month working with the school board as a member of the an excellent writing team with people who were reflective about what they were doing as teachers.

Immediately following the end of my work with the school board, I left for the annual PME conference.  I had the opportunity to attend this joint meeting of the international group of psychology of mathematics education (PME 38th annual meeting) and the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA 36th annual meeting).  Last year PME 37 was in Kiel, Germany; this year it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada; and next year it will be in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

I am a bit sad that I was unable to attend Twitter Math Camp #tmc14 where amazing people from #MTBoS gathered in Jenks, Oklahoma , USA.  Instead of crying over not being able to attend, I'm going to focus this post on the PME conference that I attended.  On the surface, PME may appear to contrast something like TMC14 where the slogan has been "Professional development by teachers, for teachers," since it is for mathematics education researchers across the world of academia.  As a consultant, John Scammell sits in between teaching and academia, and his recent post (and ensuing conversation through comments) tackles subjective dissonance that some teachers have.  I think this is actually a separate issue to blog about, so I will temporarily leave this rich discussion for another time.

This post is going to serve as an overview of the PME sessions - just in terms of structure.  As such, it isn't yet a useful post until I elaborate on the sessions that I attended.

The coordinators of PME had chosen "Mathematics Education at the Edge" as the theme.  The idea of the "edge" derives from:

1) breaking new ground or on the cutting edge of innovative research and research methodologies
2) exploring issues with groups that are often positioned at the edge or periphery or educational research such as social justice, peace education, equity, and indigenous education.

It is unlikely that I will be able to write about all the sessions -- if I did, it would probably take me several lengthy posts to do it justice.  Even this broad overview is likely going to become quite a monster.  As with everything in life, I believe that any experience is as meaningful, or as meaningless, as you want it to be.  This is likely the reason for my constant reflection on my own experiences.  I am mostly going to focus on some takeaways instead of attempting to describe everything.

Before I write about a few takeaways and a few sessions, it's worth it to first give some background and context, as well as how the sessions were organized.  There were over 850 attendants, and more than 4/5 of the people presented or facilitated sessions.  The number of participants and presenters, though, don't really give a full picture of just how huge this is.  From what I understand, this is the biggest international conference for educational researchers in the field of mathematics education and participants came from over 50 countries around the world. I suppose with exception of ICME which meets every 4 years - the next one is in Hamburg, Germany in 2016 (tentatively planning to attend that one).  Presenters all had to submit a research paper on their topic. Each of these research papers, along with longer papers that made up some of the other sessions, comprise 6 volumes of proceedings (each are approximately 460 pages)

There are several different types of sessions, each differ in their format, as well as opportunities for discussions.  The conference began on Tuesday and ended on Sunday.  Most of the days began at 9:00 AM and ended at 6:30 PM.  I will briefly describe the different types of sessions, and then hopefully elaborate on the sessions that I attended in subsequent posts:

Plenary Lecture:

There were 60-minute plenary addresses from four speakers: George Hart (USA), Orit Zaslavsky (Israel), Gabriele Kaiser (Germany), and Luis Radford (Canada).  Each of them had a different topic on mathematics education (taking place over 4 different days).  Each presenter also had a reactor who have prepared slides in response to the plenary speakers' submitted paper.  There was then 10 minutes for the initial presenter to respond.  It's quite an intense process.  One session, involving Gabriele Kaiser (plenary speaker) and Brent Davis (Reactor), was particularly memorable.  Brent had quite a few wonderings to offer, and this gave me a front row seat for an intense academic conversation.  This also made me realize that there are definitely different perspectives and paradigms across different countries with respect to mathematics education.

Plenary Panel: 

The topic of the plenary panel was The Calculus of Social Change - Mathematics at the Cutting Edge.  Mamokgethi Setati Phakeng (South Africa) was the convenor, and four individuals sat on the panel: David Wagner (Canada), Paola Valero (Denmark), Margaret Walshaw (New Zealand), and Anjum Halai (Pakistan and Tanzania).  Each panel member presented their thoughts.  This is followed by a response from another panel member, followed by an audience response.  At the same time, Mamokgethi somewhat facilitated a twitter discussion through #pme2014panel .  I will write about this in a bit.

See the post about this plenary panel here.

Research Reports:

Each research report are allotted 20 minutes for oral presentation, followed by 20 minutes for discussion. Each report deal with wide varieties of different areas of research in mathematics education.  Each session has around 25 presentation to choose from (yup... 25 concurrent sessions).  Unfortunately this means that I often had to decide between several interesting sessions.

Short Oral Communications:

If I thought it was difficult to pick between research reports... it was even harder to choose between Short Oral Communications!  Each session includes 3 short oral communications from three groups of researchers.  Each presenter (or presenting group) is allotted 10 minutes for presentations, followed by 10 minutes of discussion with the audience.  These are spread out into approximately 20 different rooms in several different buildings, with approximately 60 presenting groups during a given session.

Poster presentations:

There were 2 sessions for poster presentations.  There were approximately 140 post presentations that took place.

Research Forums:

There were 5 different research forums that took place.  Each research forum had two sessions - one near the beginning of the conference, and a second one near the end of the conference.  The goal of the research forum is to create dialogue and discussion by offering PME members more elaborate presentations, reactions, and discussions on topics.  The 5 topics were:

RF1 - The challenges of teaching mathematics with digital technologies

RF2 - Mathematical Tasks and the student (attended this one)

RF3 - Mathematical modeling in school education: mathematical, curricular, cognitive, instructional, and teacher education perspectives

RF4 - Spatial reasoning for young learners

RF5 - Habermas' construct of rational behavior in mathematics education: new advances and research questions

Here are some thoughts that came out of one of the presentations within the two sessions (9 presentations in total)

Working Sessions and Discussion Groups:

The aim of these group activities was to achieve greater exchange of information related to PME.  There were two separate sessions which also occurred near the beginning and the end.  We had to actually sign u for these sessions when we registered for the sessions.  You could pick only one, and the discussion groups and working sessions ran simultaneously so we were unable to attend both types of activities.

The topics were:

WS1 - Teacher noticing: a hidden skill of teaching

WS2 - Developing preservice elementary teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching

WS3 - Key issues regarding teacher-student interactions and roles in Assessment for learning (attended this one)

WS4 - Mathematics teacher educators' knowledge

WS5 - Special education and math working group

WS6 - The use of eye-trackng technology in mathematics education research

WS7 - A discussion on Virtual Manipulatives

DG2 - Exploring horizons of knowledge for teaching

DG3 - Mathematical discourse that breaks barriers and creates space for marginalised students

DG4 - Negative numbers: bridging contexts and symbols

DG5 - Numeracy across the curriculum

DG6 - Observing teachers observing mathematics teaching: researching the unobservable

DG7 - Preparing and supporting mathematics teacher educators: opportunities and challenges

DG8 - Researching "thinking classrooms"

DG9 - School mathematics curriculum in Centralized and decentralized educational system

DG10 - The affordances and constraints of multimodal technologies in mathematics education

DG11 - Visualization in teacher education: toward a pedagogy

DG12 - What is quality teaching-research?

Besides the different sessions listed above, there were also ad hoc sessions that took place.

I considered putting up titles of each session, but there are simply too many... in fact, there was ~33 pages of the program information of just titles and topics.  Take a look at the different topics if you are interested.  I have the proceedings that I will likely be reading through over the next little while.