Third David Clarke Memorial Lecture to be delivered by Yoshinori Shimizu

The Third David Clarke Memorial Lecture was delivered by Professor Yoshinori Shimizu on Monday, February 13th, 2023.

David Clarke Memorial Lecture

Problematizing the Prerequisites for Classroom Research
from the Learner's Perspective
by Professor Yoshinori Shimizu

An anonymous mathematics educator from Japan appears twice in the book The Teaching Gap (1999), that described major findings of the first TIMSS Video Study (TVS) and their implications for the improvement of classroom instruction and the professional development through Lesson Study. Guess who he is? In this talk, Yoshi Shimizu shares an unknown origin of the Learner's Perspective Study (LPS) which started with his participation in the TVS as a consultant, followed by his reflections on the development of the LPS community of the researchers led by David Clarke. The LPS was designed with the aspiration of providing complementary accounts to the findings of other classroom studies, such as TVS, of complex social settings called classrooms by providing and analyzing rich data with the value and voice of both the leaners and the teacher. The study has the capacity of not only complementing other studies but also problematizing the prerequisites for classroom research. Based on the strength of the LPS, he shares a Japanese perspective on the reality of classroom by focusing on the tradition of lesson study and on teachers' efforts of amalgamation of the learner's perspective and their own in planning and implementing mathematics lessons.

Photo of Professor Yoshinori ShimizuProfessor Yoshinori Shimizu

Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan

Yoshinori Shimizu is a mathematics educator who works at University of Tsukuba in Japan where he is currently serving as the Chair of Degree Programs in Education. He was a consultant of the first (1995) TIMSS Videotape Classroom Study and a member of Mathematics Expert Group MEG for OECD/PISA 2003 to 2009. With David Clarke and Christine Keitel he founded the Learner’s Perspective Study (LPS), an international comparative study on mathematics classrooms, and worked as the Japanese team leader of the project. He participates in the ongoing International Classroom Lexicon Project led and conceived by David Clarke with Carmel Mesiti as Project Manager at the University of Melbourne. Currently he is in his second term as President of the Japan Society of Mathematical Education. He has published books and journal articles internationally. Recently, he served as one of the guest editors with Berinderjeet Kaur, Carmel Mesiti, and Man Ching Esther Chan for the special issue of ZDM-Mathematics Education: Understanding complexity in the mathematics classroom: In memoriam David Clarke (Volume 54, issue 2, May 2022).