Conocimiento especializado de un profesor de educación infantil para la enseñanza de cuerpos geométricos

Resum

The interest in the knowledge of the Early Childhood Education teacher is an incipient line of research. To collaborate with the advances in this line, our research objective is to describe and interpret the specialized knowledge of an Early Childhood Education teacher when teaching geometric solids. We review the previous work of the knowledge of the Early Childhood Education teacher regarding the teaching of mathematics and reflect on the relevance of the existing theoretical models, justifying why we finally opted for the Mathematics Teacher’s Specialised Knowledge (MTSK) model to give theoretical support to this research. We approach this study with an interpretative paradigm and a research design coinciding with an instrumental case study. Our informant is José (pseudonym), an active Early Childhood Education teacher with more than a decade of experience at this stage, whose interest in improving his classroom practice led him to receive specific training in Mathematics Didactics. The information collection instruments used were eight non-participant classroom observations (video recordings) and five semi-structured interviews. Our case study, in addition to providing us with interesting and valuable data regarding the specialised knowledge of the Early Childhood Education teacher, offers us the opportunity to reflect on the validity of the MTSK model at this stage, inasmuch as it has been created from studies carried out with Primary and Secondary school teachers. As a starting point to analyze the information, we use the MTSK model domains, subdomains and categories (Carrillo et al., 2018), together with the reflection and adaptation of the model for the childhood stage presented in Muñoz-Catalán et al. (2022). The results show that the MTSK model is valid for the childhood stage, although these highlight the limitation of the characterization of some of the Mathematical knowledge domain (MK) subdomains to identify and express idiosyncratic aspects of the knowledge of the Early Childhood teacher, something that were already sensed by works like Muñoz-Catalán et al. (2022). In this way, from our work we propose an approach to the specialized knowledge of the Early Childhood Education teacher characterization when teaching geometric solids, which has meant the emergence of some subcategories that collect idiosyncratic aspects of this knowledge. In particular, the data have revealed that teacher’s knowledge about language at this stage plays an important role on the construction of student knowledge, which has decisively influenced this proposal. This paper reflects the complexity of the knowledge of the Early Childhood Education teacher, highlighting the importance of the knowledge domains of the topics and mathematical practices knowledge, which have supported mostly the decisions made in their classroom, this reaffirms the need for a solid specialised knowledge in the mathematical domain of these professionals.