Task design with sequences of photographs in mathematics teacher training

Abstract

Recently, researchers in Educational Mathematics, in-service teachers and prospective teachers have paid attention to open-ended tasks design. These tasks are considered a powerful tool to encourage all students to feel involved in the construction of knowledge and to lead to in-depth discussions about mathematical objects in the classroom. This paper presents a new resource for the design of open-ended tasks: sequences of photographs. From an activity framed in a Mathematics Education course in initial teacher training, the student teachers designed tasks with sequences of photographs to be proposed to secondary school students. Some of the tasks designed are reported, in order to demonstrate the strengths and difficulties found in the design process, as well as the potential that this type of task has for mathematics teaching.