David Clarke Memorial Lectures
The David Clarke Memorial Lecture commemorates Professor Clarke's life and significant contributions to learning and teaching.
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Gap gazing or recognising strengths: Rethinking mathematics education
In Australia, New Zealand, and internationally, diverse groups of people including indigenous, migrant, and other minority communities are under-represented in mathematics. Additionally, this narrative or ‘gap story’ is exacerbated by the methods we use to assess achievement within school systems. A subsequent outcome is a lack of awareness of the rich mathematics and strengths that students from these communities bring to mathematics classrooms.
In this Dean’s Lecture, Professor Hunter will challenge the ‘gap story’ told about minority communities in New Zealand and the Pacific by sharing stories of mathematics collected using visual and narrative methods from children and parents. These stories will highlight what we can learn from the voices of minority communities and how we can rethink mathematics education in the classroom. It will also discuss the importance of diverse learners being positioned to explore their use of mathematics in their lives outside of schooling, and illustrate how this provides students, parents, and educators with opportunities to reconsider mathematics and value the connections between differing knowledge systems.
5:30, refreshments, 6 - 7pm, lecture, Wednesday 8 May
For more information on past Lectures and the work of David Clarke, visit the International Community for Classroom Research (ICCR) Hub webpage at the link below:
Professor David Clarke
Professor David Clarke became a valued member of the Faculty of Education in 1994, dedicating his expertise and passion to the institution until his passing in 2020. He was internationally well known for his establishment and leadership of a substantial, extensive, innovative research programme in video-based classroom research involving more than 20 countries. He founded the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR) in 2003, a facility unique in its support of the generation, storage and collaborative analysis of complex classroom data. Under the leadership of Professor Clarke, the ICCR hosted a number of internally and externally funded research projects supporting an extensive international network of researchers.
For most of his educational research career, spanning almost 40 years, Professor Clarke focused on moving the field towards greater, critical self-reflection, and increasingly sophisticated research designs as well as research tools for understanding complex teaching and learning practices in different parts of the world. These lectures honour the life of Professor Clarke and his substantial contribution to the Faculty and the research and education communities around the world.