It's part of my life: Engaging University and community to enhance mathematics education: the USQ experience

This paper outlines the USQ’s involvement in the OLT project “It’s part of my life”. We plan to improve teacher knowledge by linking pre-service teachers with the university’s applied mathematicians and specialist educators to develop pre-service teachers’ understanding of mathematics modelling through the context of everyday life in the Toowoomba region. Pre-service teachers will teach into our already successful Maths Enrichment Program for year 9 and 10 students. Here students from the community come to USQ and engage in interactive sessions run by local mathematicians. Proposed topics include: Are more dentists needed in Toowoomba?; Modelling Dust on the Darling Downs; UV radiation modelling for surfers at Fraser Coast; and, Detention basins for flood mitigation. An Office of Learning and Teaching project, “It’s part of my life”, is designed to improve pre-service teacher training at the university level by investigating the effect of giving pre-service teachers pedagogy, discipline competence, and confidence while planning mathematics and science mini-lessons to teach to school students. The project involves a series of iterated trials to develop and gauge the effectiveness of enhancement and feedback modules to ensure that they are suitable for embedding within teacher education and other university curriculum. More specifically, the project aims to: • strengthen pre-service teachers’ competence and confidence in teaching mathematics and science; • engage pre-service teachers with the mathematics and science that underpins everyday life in Australian regional communities and incorporate this into teaching practice; • foster collaborative networking between university scientists, mathematicians, educators and pre service teachers within and across a Regional Universities Network (RUN) institutions; and, • provide a sustainable and scalable approach for enhancement of pre-service teacher education curriculum for adoption in a range of regional, remote and indigenous contexts. This paper concentrates on the mathematics curriculum and the trials are situated in the Darling Downs and Brisbane West region of Queensland with the support of the University of Southern Queensland. The trials are based within a Year 9 and 10 mathematics classroom with groups of preservice teachers teaching iterations of mathematics lessons with the guidance and support of mathematicians and mathematics educators.