Conference Agenda

In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, proficiency in numeracy skills provides students essential cognitive tools to interpret evidence, evaluate risk and rewards, and make informed decisions. Thus, effective numeracy instruction offers students hope by empowering them with capacities for reasoning and problem solving vital for personal agency and civic participation. This highlights an imperative within teacher education programs worldwide. However, teaching numeracy poses significant challenges for many preservice teachers. Specifically, conceptual ambiguity regarding numeracy presents difficulties for both teacher educators and future teachers across many countries. These difficulties are further compounded by growing attention given to numeracy in educational policies and standards in places like the UK, US, Canada and Australia. These policies increasingly mandate that all subject area teachers take responsibility for teaching numeracy concepts relevant to their disciplines. For example, in the UK, the National Numeracy Strategy instituted a requirement that numeracy be explicitly addressed across all subjects in primary and secondary schools. Similarly, countries like Australia and Canada have introduced standardized literacy and numeracy tests for entrance into many teacher preparation programs. However, international research indicates personal numeracy competence does not necessarily equate to pedagogical expertise in teaching numeracy. Furthermore, pedagogical knowledge alone does not necessarily translate into positive teacher beliefs about their own motivation and self-efficacy to teach numeracy. Extensive previous research reinforces that these affective variables exert significant influence on student numeracy outcomes. This highlights an imperative within teacher education programs worldwide to intertwine building content expertise with efforts to cultivate positive teacher beliefs. Presently, limited data has emerged regarding pre-service teachers’ own motivation and self-efficacy to teach numeracy across different subjects and age groups. Additional perspectives are needed to evaluate teacher educators’ views on best practices for developing pre-service teachers’ beliefs and competencies. Further comparative investigation of the roots of pre-service teachers’ self-beliefs and motivations towards teaching numeracy is therefore vital and could illuminate improvements to initial teacher education involving numeracy curriculum and pedagogy internationally.

The present research examines preservice teachers’ levels of motivation and self-efficacy for teaching numeracy using a mixed methods design. Quantitative findings derived from a newly developed survey instrument demonstrated variability in levels of motivation and self-efficacy beliefs among 729 teacher candidates. Factor analysis indicated that both motivation and self-efficacy to teach numeracy represented valid and reliable factors reflective of Goos’ rich interpretation of numeracy. Subsequent interviews with nine teacher educators yielded qualitative themes such as the significance of previous mathematical education and experience, and the role of teacher educators in fostering critical thinking of pre-service teachers. Integrating the quantitative and qualitative results highlights the need for sustained efforts to understand and improve teacher motivation and self-efficacy to teach numeracy within teacher education. Further research is needed to continue to improve the reliability and validity of the newly developed measure in conjunction with longitudinal and intervention studies. Overall, findings provide additional knowledge to inform ongoing program development and empirical inquiry regarding the field of numeracy teaching within initial teacher education.

Contribution

Education serves as a key to independence and personal development. In Sweden, children with intellectual disabilities attend a Compulsory School for Pupils with Intellectual disabilities. The education is adapted to the needs of each pupil and aims to provide knowledge, personal development and well-being. There is high staff density with special education teachers and paraprofessionals. Much of the educational practice is conducted by teaching assistants without any formal academic training and there is evidence that communication regarding these teaching and learning processes between teachers and paraprofessionals to be a hurdle. There is limited research that has engaged with the everyday practices within these school settings.

Incorporated within a broader research initiative, this study is conducted within the framework of a larger research project carried out in collaboration between a specialised compulsory school and university: "The path towards collaboration for education in a Compulsory School for Pupils with Intellectual disabilities: in the tension between teaching, care, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy."

The study is grounded in the Sociocognitive theory formation (Bandura, 1977), which emphasizes how learning and knowledge development are influenced by interactions among individuals, their environment, and their own cognitive processes. In the context of Compulsory School for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities, the focus will be how teaching and care are shaped and impacted by social and cognitive factors.

The research investigates how teaching and care in Compulsory School for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities take shape within the framework of sociocognitive theory. The study will shed light on how teachers and students can interact to create a conducive learning environment and how sociocognitive processes can influence students' well-being and knowledge development.

Within Sociocognitive theory, self-efficacy, also known as confidence or self-capability (Bandura, 1997), is a central concept. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's perceived ability to successfully perform a task within a specific context. In this study, the sociocognitive theory with a focus on self-efficacy will be utilised as the theoretical framework for interpreting the results.

In this study, sociocognitive theory with a focus on self-efficacy will be used as the theoretical framework to interpret the results and describe how self-efficacy, according to sociocognitive theory, can impact teaching and care in Compulsory school for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities.

The analysis explores how self-efficacy manifests itself in students and how it affects their engagement, goal setting, and perseverance in the learning process, as well as how teachers' beliefs in students' abilities influence instruction.

The individual's belief in their ability to perform a specific task, according to Bandura's theory of self-efficacy, influences the goals they set and their confidence in achieving them. The level of self-confidence affects how much effort the individual invests in reaching these goals and the degree of persistence when facing challenges (Caprara, G.V., Barbaranelli, C., Steca, P. & Malone, P.S., 2006).

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between teaching and care in a Compulsory School for Pupils with Intellectual disabilities. The study describes how teaching and care take place and how these factors can interact to benefit students' knowledge development.

The purpose is further specified in the following research questions:

• How does teaching occur in Compulsory School for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities?

• How does care take place in Compulsory School for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities?

• How can teaching and care interact to promote students' knowledge development in Compulsory School for Pupils with severe Intellectual disabilities?

While contemporary research affirms we will soon arrive at the point of irreconcilable ecological breakdown, new technologies are advancing rapidly, imbricating themselves into every facet of our lives. Yet today’s mainstream Environmental Education (EE) research lacks thorough exploration of the onto-epistemological origins surrounding how education could/should exist within current entanglements of technology with/in nature. In fact, EE, as positioned in its neoliberal context, driven by a Eurocentric research community, has defaulted to anthropocentric perspectives which force a nature/culture binary (Aikens et al., 2016). What’s more, potentially promising alternative (or ‘transformative’) approaches remain fragmented across EE and are oftentimes inaccessible to teachers.

This paper is thus positioned within the critical current of posthumanism, which brings together critiques of exclusionary, hierarchical, and anthropocentric humanisms from, for example, feminist, decolonial, queer, ecofeminist, STS, and environmental studies (Braidotti, Jones, & Klumbytė, 2022). Critical posthumanism includes decolonial perspectives, which challenge narratives that promote unbridled technological progress by unravelling human/tech, human/nature, and nature/tech binaries and can centre EE within the ever-plural, entangled nature that includes all environments (biological, social, technological), viewing these environments as ontologically and epistemologically entangled (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017). Critical posthuman onto-epistemologies are particularly relevant to this aim of reconceptualising EE in an ecologically and technologically uncertain world as they stress the hybrid, intersectional, and relational aspects of existence where humans are irreducibly entangled with technology and the environment, co-evolving alongside one another. (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, Jones, & Klumbytė, 2022)

As a result, in my ongoing research as a doctoral scholar, I argue that EE should engage more critically and deeply with envisioning and enacting new ways of being in the world. I propose a reconceptualisation of education that disrupts the constraints of an anthropocentric education system in the Global North, and engages with transformative approaches that do not perpetuate epistemic, social, ecological or technological violence, so we might collectively and effectively help our students navigate the realities of their future and our changing world. I ask: what does living, thriving and dying well on a damaged planet ask from Environmental Education? I draw from the ‘real utopia’ movement within social sciences and humanities research, which formulate concrete proposals to address systemic injustices designed to challenge and transform existing paradigms (Wright, 2010). To do so, this research takes a decolonial approach to Levitas’ (2013) three-staged methodological-philosophical framework ‘Utopia-as-Method’ (UAM) to not only critically analyse the current discourse in EE but also to imagine and construct alternative habits of knowing and being which take into account the technological realities of today’s world.

In this project, UAM’s first stage, Archaeology, involves a critical exploration of current trends, underlying assumptions and metanarratives in EE through a critical hermeneutic literature review, serving as a basis for envisioning transformative alternatives. Stage 2, Ontology, is grounded on an exploration of alternative ways of being and possibilities for the future through decolonial diffractive readings, while Stage 3, Architecture, is where I seek to build alternative EE futures drawing on a research-creation method. This paper will briefly discuss the trends emerging from Stage 1, including, for example, the aforementioned anthropocentric, Western-centric research community, resulting in various instances of colonial modernity and techno-optimism.

The methodological approach of Stage 2 (decolonial diffractive readings) will then be discussed in detail. Having critically considered and unearthed many underlying assumptions and conditions in EE, Stage 2, the Ontology stage of UAM, is grounded on an exploration of alternative ways of being and possibilities for the future, challenging existing ideas and boundaries. Finally, this paper will discuss the implications of these findings on the final UAM Stage within the broader research project.