Teachers Views on Revisiting the Operation of Signed Numbers Using Contexts : A Case of Three African Teachers - Research

The teaching of mathematics remains one of the most challenging endeavours for the majority of practitioners in mathematics education. The fundamental aspect of teaching mathematics, namely, to teach leaners to do mathematics, places on teachers the responsibility of ensuring that learners be involved in providing more that the answers question posed to them. When a learner of mathematics provides a response of 0 to the sum (+1) + (-1), for instance, what kind of processes has the learner enacted in coming with that answer? More importantly how do teachers explain these processes to the learners? The qualitative study involved a case of three African who were responding on how they could use contexts in the teaching of mathematics. Not only did the teachers resort to the application of rules to respond to the tasks but they could not recognise the opportunities provided by contexts for doing the operation of signed numbers. This paper revisit how teachers could explain the operation of signed numbers using contexts by re-defining the concept of zero and use the latter to do the addition and subtraction of signed numbers.