The Resources of the Teacher

In this subsection, I describe how teacher resources are classified and presented in the case study. I then illustrate this with an example of a table of such classifications.

As discussed earlier in Chapter 2, mathematics teaching resources in this study include everything that supports and facilitates teachers’ practices. This includes text resources; ICT resources; other material resources (e.g. handheld students’

whiteboards); human resources (people and collectives – face-to-face and virtual);

digital curriculum resources; and social and cognitive resources. A crucial undertaking for teachers is their interactions with curriculum materials, with other resources and with colleagues. In their work with resources they search, select, create,

110 modify, and adapt them to support their professional activities and also co-design and share with their colleagues. With the advent of digitisation, there is a growing proliferation of resources that has profoundly changed the dynamics of sharing knowledge and offers new forms of communication, association and networking amongst teachers.

In the process of the analysis on resources, first, I systematically noted the resources I observed in use in the lesson and at what point each was used: resources cited and mentioned during the interviews; resources referred to during the screen capture dialogue; and resources inferred from the documents. Second, in order to give a meaningful order to the array of resources, they were logically classified into manageable divisions. This is also reported in Umameh and Monaghan (2017). The dataset relevant to addressing RQ 2. 1 (What resource do mathematics teachers access and use?) on page 7 were coded and thematically mapped, and repeatedly grouped and regrouped into categories (the term ‘category’ is used for a set of codes). The coding process produced many codes/categories. The four stages in the development from initial coding/categories to the classification in Table 5-1 below are described in detail in Chapter 3, p. 37.

I then drew on the ‘law of excluded middle’ (A or not A) from classical mathematics to categorise the resources logically into ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. This provides a as one way of partitioning all the resources a teacher may use. Taking this logical division further, I partitioned human resources into those where there is ‘physical contact’ and those where there is ‘not physical contact’; similarly, non-human resources can be partitioned into those which are ‘electronic’ and those which are

‘non-electronic’. The final division is to partition electronic resources into ‘hardware’

and ‘not hardware’ (notice that ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ is not a logical partition) and non-electronic resources into those created by the individual teacher under consideration (‘individual’, e.g. Kitty, who is one of the teachers in school A and her profile is discussed in subsequently in Chapter 6) and those which were not created by the individual teacher under consideration (‘not individual’). Note that a worksheet created by Kitty and used by Kitty and Emilia would be coded ‘individual’ for teacher

111 Kitty but ‘not individual’ for Emilia. (Emilia is one of the four teachers in school A and her profile is discussed in the next chapter.)

I do acknowledge that further divisions are possible. For instance, ‘human, physical contact’ could be partitioned into ‘formal’ (e.g. within a scheduled meeting that has an agenda) or ‘informal’ but I found the classification provided in Table 5-1 below as sufficient to accommodate all of the codings developed, and also manageable.

Table 5-1 below is the table of classification of mathematics teacher resources.

Human Non-Human

Hardware Not Hardware Individual Not Individual Table 5-1. Classification of resources

Table 5-1 above is then used to classify the resources of the seven mathematics teachers in this research in the case studies in Chapters 6-8. Full details of the resources indicated by individual mathematics teachers and those identified by the researcher are discussed in the case study chapters. Here, I present the classification of Kitty’s resources as an example of how individual teacher’s resources are

Not Hardware Individual Not Individu

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Table 5-2. Classification of Kitty’s resources

Table 5-2 above shows the classification of Kitty’s resources. In the subsequent chapters on the case study presentation, this classification is undertaken for each teacher. In the classification of the resources, two broad themes and six sub-themes emerged as a way of classifying these resources. For instance, in the case of Kitty above, I considered the resources under these two broad themes of human and non-human. An additional subdivision under the human resources was human resources with physical contact and not with physical contacts. In Kitty’s case, human resources with physical contact include continuing professional development (CPD), TeachMeet, the Chinese teacher, and mathematics trail activities where human contact is involved. In the human but non-physical contact resources category, Podcast, Twitter, YouTube, and Khan Academy are identified. These resources involve human actors, but no direct physical contact takes place in the usage.

In the second broad theme, human, a further subdivision into electronics and non-electronics follows. In the case of Kitty above, under the non-electronics category are the hardware (i.e., iPads, IWB and iWB-handheld whiteboards) and non-hardware, which refers to those resources that are electronics but are not hardware (e.g., Mangahigh and Socrative). Under the non-electronics sub-category are individual and not individual resources. The individual resources refer to all the resources designed and used by a specific teacher (e.g., worksheets) and the not individual are resources that are collectively owned by all the teachers in the department; usually these resources are held in the ‘shared bank of resources’ (a folder which contains all the resources

113 that are considered ‘good’ by the teachers and are accessible to all the teachers in the department).