Background of the Study Setting

This study was conducted in Mumbai, India with middle school mathematics teachers. Conducting the study in India had two main reasons. First, based on the research questions it was clear that the study would involve careful examination of teaching practice. Teaching is a cultural activity (Stigler and Heibert, 2009). Teaching, as we saw in the conceptual framework chapter, is very complicated phenomena and would involve practices, notations, and norms that are subtle and specific to a culture. Considering my experience of teaching mathematics and working with mathematics teachers in India, it made more sense to collect the teaching data from India, to be able to make sense of the cultural subtlety. The second reason was to see the diverse classroom settings. India has many kinds of school systems, where many things vary. Like schools with free education too expensive education, with low paid but secured jobs for government teachers to highly

paid but no security for private teachers, etc. In some sense such diversity was necessary – as one of the causes for which the HCK is essential is to create meaningful access to mathematics. And it was important to find out whether such meaningful access is available for all the classes and school cadres.

For educational and maintenance purpose, every town in all the districts of India is divided into municipal wards. In Mumbai, there are total 24 wards, which monitor and supervise education, water, and other government provided facilities. This study was conducted in one such ward called M-East ward. (See Figure 3.1). The population in M- East ward is 0.8 million people as per the 2011 Census report. There are 202 government schools in this ward. These run up to grade 7 only.

There are three kinds of schools in India: public, private aided, and private un-aided schools. Public schools are often called as government schools. There are two kinds of government schools––ones that are supported by the state (local) government and the other supported by the government in the Centre. These schools are fully funded by the respective government and provide free education to everybody up to higher secondary (K to12). Up to grade 8, these schools also provide school uniforms, mid-day meals, textbooks, notebooks, and minimum supplies. The state public schools are commonly referred by the name of their municipality. For example, a state funded municipal school in Lucknow, will be referred as Lucknow Municipality Corporation School. Similarly a public school in Mumbai will be called as Mumbai Municipal Corporation (MMC) School. The state funded schools follow state curriculum framework and state textbooks. Considering that the education provided is free of cost, one would expect a very high enrollment in these schools. However, doubts about the quality of these schools mean that they struggle to maintain a healthy enrollment.

The government schools supported by the central government operate as a chain of schools across the country. In earlier times, these schools primarily catered to the children of government officers who had moving jobs, like Army, Navy, government administration, etc. These schools across the country follow the same timetable, the same holidays, and the same curriculum in the same order. So even though a child’s parents are transferred in the middle of the year to some other state, the child studying in school funded by the government in the centre will face minimum disturbance. However, since Right to

Education Act (2009), these schools are expected to enroll 20% of their children from the families in the local community.

Then there are private schools that are aided by the government. The aid varies from part to full support to the schools. The financial support is provided based on per child calculation and it is not rare to find a school where one of the divisions (e.g., 3rd _standard

division D) is not at all funded. All the private schools whether they are funded or not by the government, charge a minimal fee to the students. The aid is disbursed based on certain norms; one of the important ones is to follow the state curriculum. The private un-aided schools need to be registered as a school, but do not receive funding from the government. These schools are run by trustee boards and often are more or less experimental in their functioning, depending on the authorities involved. These schools could have their own philosophy of education and they fall into further categories as experimental, religious or international school.

Participants in the study.

The data collected includes 13 teachers’ classroom teaching videos. Brief information of these teachers is given in the table below (See Table 3.1). Each teacher's teaching of three mathematical units from the curriculum of grade 7 was observed. All the teachers except two used the same textbook. The state textbooks in India are first written in the language of the state in which they will be used, and in state of Maharashtra they are translated in to 13 mediums of instruction. The textbooks developed under the National council are written in English first and then trasnlated to other languages.

The textbooks used by the teachers in the study were in three main languages – Marathi (local language of the state of Maharashtra), Urdu (language spoken by the Muslim minority) and English (Third official language of the state, and popular among upper social and economic classes). The textbook developed by the State Council of Education, Research and Training (SCERT) for the state of Maharashtra was used by the 11 of the 13 teachers in the study. The remaining two teachers used the textbook developed by the NCERT of the Central Government.

Teacher name

(pseudonyms) Gender Medium of Instruction Teaching experience Education Academic Education Teaching

Koregaonkar Female Marathi 23 years PhD, MA B.Ed.

Bhinde Male Marathi 22 years MA B.Ed.

Tope Female Marathi 23 years BA B.Ed.

Bhoke Male Marathi 18 years BA B.Ed.

Ruksat Female Urdu 24 years MSc B.Ed.

Karim Male Urdu 27 years BA B.Ed.

Razak Male Urdu 19 years BA B.Ed.

Asmita Female Semi-English 7 years BA B.Ed.

Parveen Female English 4 years B.Sc. B.Ed.

Sangita Female English 12 years B.Sc. B.Ed.

Meenu Female English 16 years M.Sc. B.Ed.

Damini Female English 23 years M.Sc. B.Ed.

Nasir Male Urdu 27 years MA B.Ed.

Table 3.1: Participants of the Study

There are 8 female teachers and 6 male teachers. All of them have taught different grades ranging from 5th _{to 7}th _{and during the educational year of the data collection, 2015}

they were all teaching grade 7. Seven of these 13 taught in government educational schools and therefore were teaching all the subjects to their respective class, except language and drawing.