Video-Cued Parental Dialogs: A Promising Venue for Exploring Early Childhood Mathematics

Abstract

Research literature to date provides limited insights about the mathematics learning of young children developed within the context of family, and families’ perspectives on young children’s mathematics. As we push to develop better mathematics learning opportunities for young children, parents seem to be left out of the picture. This study, eliciting parental voices through multivocal video-cued interviews, showed parental insight about the processes of their four and five year old children engaging with mathematics out of school, with particular interest in mathematics content ranging from number sense to data analysis, and parents’ pedagogical ways of and concerns about contextual aspects of their children’s mathematics. Findings from this research indicate that teachers’ video-cued dialogs with parents could have potential to inform practice, at first in acknowledging parents-asintellectual resources, and then, in creating spaces where teachers and parents might come together and engage in learning from each other about ways to create more diverse mathematics learning opportunities for young children in and out of school. These dialogues could help teachers to make curricular connections with parents, as they inquire together about how children engage in and transform mathematical practices as they move back and forth between home and school.