Summary of the meeting
This transnational meeting of the project CaLSAM started on Monday morning, 10th February 2025, and continued until Wednesday, 12th February 2025, at lunchtime. It was the first transnational meeting in this Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership and served as the kick-off event organized by the University of Bielefeld (UNIBI). Getting to know the project partners and their perspectives on multilingual teaching and learning in mathematics education was the first aim of this meeting. Furthermore, it was the beginning of organizing the following work packages in the project, planning next meetings, and distributing tasks among partners as well as a consortial training activity about teacher professional development following a multilingual approach.
On Monday, the project partners who attended in person and online introduced themselves briefly, stating their research field and what they would contribute to the project. After that the first point of the meeting was the presentation of objectives of CaLSAM and activities necessary to achieve during the different work packages, e. g. conduction of the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and Teacher Professional Development workshops (TPD), development of a digital platform for resource sharing, dissemination of language-sensitive materials and multilingual teaching strategies, organisation of multiplier events. An overview of all the work packages and their respective coordinators can be found in Chap. 7 (see Figure A). That was followed by little presentations from each participating country around their ideas and expertise on content-and-language-sensitive teaching in math classes.
Sikunder Ali and Danyal Farsani (NTNU) presented some aspects of their research on Critical Mathematics Education. They also explained key facts about the new Norwegian Curriculum that pays attention to developing critical thinking and democracy, as well as reasoning and argumentation, while engaging in communicative situations in math classes. At last, they reflected some concrete ideas about integrating CaLSAM in their university seminar for master’s students in Mathematics Education.
Mustafa Güler and Erdem Çekmez (TRU) shared their experiences regarding the role of language in Mathematics Education. They discussed an insightful learning situation that occurred during a university seminar on indeterminate forms and L’Hospital’s theorem. During one lesson, a student asked the following question: “Teacher, if we can find or determine these limits, then why do we call them indeterminate?”. Inspired by this question, they pursued the research interest of investigating how math students derive meaning from adjectives that are used in mathematical propositions and how (pre-service) math teachers translate between the symbolic and verbal forms of mathematical propositions.
Ángela Uribe (CH-PHSG) presented some results of previous research projects on multilingualism in mathematics classrooms, such as MUM-Multi (funded by the BMBF) and a current research project on talking about mathematics in kindergarten, such as MATHEspRechen at the CH-PHSG (funded by movetia). The latter project focuses on the concept of Repertoires-in-Use of multilingual learners.
Craig Neville (UCC), a lecturer of English as an Additional Language, embodies the interdisciplinary nature of the project consortium. During his presentation, he highlighted various aspects of content and language integrated learning (CLIL), including plurilingualism, code-switching, translanguaging and translation, and teacher language awareness.
In the afternoon, the project partners discussed ideas, keywords, and concepts that they thought were important for CaLSAM were collected and discussed (see Figure B in Chap. 7).
On Tuesday morning, the discussions went into more depth about when and how the COIL and TPD could be implemented in each country’s system. This is because there are differences between countries, for example in the number of pre-service teachers available, as well as differences in the time structure and formats of teacher professional development workshops (online/hybrid/in person). They must be taken into consideration in order to conduct the TPD and COIL effectively.
Then the consortial training activity following a multilingual approach, led by Taha Kuzu (DE-PHSG) – expert on the field of multilingualism in Mathematics Education – and Kerstin Gerlach (UNIBI) – expert on the field of language-sensitive mathematics teaching and learning – was carried out. At first, they presented the idea of using vignettes as a foundation for the professional development workshops in CaLSAM, which could be structured in modules that can be adapted for the TPD and COIL (see suggestion of modules in Chap. 7). Taha and Kerstin understand vignettes as situated and complexity-reduced learning opportunities that support (pre-service) teachers in developing professional action knowledge. Vignettes can be videos, transcripts, examples from existing research articles, university seminars or classroom observation. They can focus language registers, dialects of an additional language or the usage of multiple languages in learning and teaching mathematics. The key idea is that vignettes can be used to start each module developed in CaLSAM.
To illustrate this, Taha presented concrete examples of possible vignettes, such as a video (and transcript) of a discursive learning situation in which two multilingual learners discuss and explain their winning strategies for playing the game NIM, a game with potentials for learning maths. The project partners evaluated and discussed the idea of using vignettes as a foundation of the professional development workshops in CaLSAM.
Finally, the project partners collaboratively developed the first ideas for the CaLSAM framework and guidelines, a document that is the DNA of the project, representing the expertise of the partners expertise and serving as the blueprint for developing the TPD and COIL. All ideas were documented in a shared Google Doc (link).
In between, there was some time to sort out some practical things for the project, such as organizing travel documents as well as dates for the next Transnational Meeting in person in Trondheim in October 2025 and the next Online Meeting on 12th May 2025.
On Wednesday, the last day of the kick-off event, the project partners discussed upcoming tasks. Final decisions on the next dates were made. The day ended with a joint lunch in the university canteen.
Overall Impression
This Transnational Meeting placed a strong emphasis on communication between project partners with different views, appreciating the diversity among them. Acknowledging different languages and backgrounds was a key factor in all conversations, which is promising for handling the language sensitivity that comes with this project.