Language is not only individual words and grammar. Your use of language is affected by your cultural and socioeconomic identity. The speaker is most often unaware of the cultural baggage on his or her language use. This affects the relationship between teachers and students, also in the mathematics classroom. This could be seen as a central idea in the research of Eva Norén.
Teachers are more important than the subject knowledge they confer during their classes. They also act as a bridge to the culture and society. Eva Norén has studies mathematics education at seven schools with a concentrated immigrant population for three years. At all schools where the project was ongoing the teachers were actively working with the language. In a large section of the schools the teachers taught in two languages in parallel – Swedish and Somali or Swedish and Arabic.
- That bilingual teaching leads to better results among students with a second mother tongue has been shown in a number of studies from various countries. Eva Norén confirmed this through her interviews with teachers and students. One reason is of course that the capability to translate a word or concept to the student. But partly it is that students who are taught in their mother tongue have better access to their entire personality and can in that way form their identities in a broader manner says Eva Norén.
A bilingual teacher that knows your cultural codes can reach you in a familiar way. Part of an educational context is actually not all about language but also a very social experience.
The laws of mathematics are the same everywhere. But how people learn mathematics is partly cultural. For example, the same mathematical task can be formulated differently dependent on where you are in the world.
- Many of the teachers I have met and helped in their professional development have not even heard that they can construct a subtraction or division in any other way than the way they learned it themselves in school, says Eva Norén.
She also says that for example in contemporary Arabic culture playing cards is very unusual. Therefore, using examples of counting from the world of card is may cause confusion among students. In Somali society money lending is done in a different way that in Sweden and therefore concepts such as interest may be harder to relate to. Here another aspect of Eva Norén’s research is highlighted, the power relations between teachers and students. The teacher profession does put the teacher in a position of power.
- Even in the mathematics the power relation between teacher and student affects classroom and its discourses. This may be something that the teacher is not aware of, says Eva Norén.
Bilingual education is very unusual in Swedish mathematics classrooms. But Eva Norén is hopeful. May teachers that recently got their teachers certificate have a non Swedish cultural background as well as a Swedish, and may even be bilingual. Even if you do not speak your students mother tongue, you can do something so simple as learning how to count to ten in that language. Eva Norén says that she believes that the most important thing is to have an open attitude towards bilingualism.
- I wish that Swedish speaking teachers in mathematics, in any mathematics classroom, does not see it as a problem that there are students in their class that does not have Swedish as their mother tongue. But rather tries to see the resources the students bring to class in the form of culture and language, and that is something all mathematics classrooms can learn from.
Interviewed by Henrik Lundström
