Curriculum Materials in Mathematics Education Reform: A Framework for Examining Teachers’ Curriculum Development

This paper presents a model of teachers’ construction of mathematics curriculum in the classroom or their curriculum development activities. The model emerged through a qualitative study of two experienced, elementary teachers during their first year of using a commercially published, reform-oriented textbook that had been adopted by their district (Remillard 1996). The aim of the study was to examine teachers’ interactions with a new textbook in order to gain insight into the potential for curriculum materials to contribute to reform in mathematics teaching. The resulting model integrates research on teachers’ use of curriculum materials (cf. Stodolsky 1989) and studies of teachers’ construction of curriculum in their classrooms (cf. Doyle 1993). The model includes three arenas in which teachers engage in curriculum development: design, construction, and curriculum mapping. Each arena defines a particular realm of the curriculum development process about which teachers explicitly or implicitly make different types of decisions. The design arena involves selecting and designing mathematical tasks. The construction arena involves enacting these tasks in the classroom and responding to students’ encounters with them. The curriculum mapping arena involves determining the organization and content of the entire curriculum into which daily events fit. Through articulating each piece of the model, the author highlights the complex and multidimensional nature of teachers’ curriculum processes, identifies significant characteristics of each arena that have implications for textbook use and instructional change, and indicates areas that call for further understanding and research. For at least a decade, mathematics educators have sought change in the curriculum and pedagogy of school mathematics (cf. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 1989, 1991). An unresolved question in these efforts has been the role that curriculum materials can and should play. Curriculum materials were the primary vehicles used in the 1950s and 1960s to stimulate curricular change, but their “teacher-proof ” approach has since taken much of the blame for the failure of these initiatives. Consequently, reformers have been cautious about relying too heavily on © 1999 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Curriculum Inquiry 29:3 (1999) Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road,