Project Description
Care is rarely foregrounded in university mathematics teaching, especially in large first-year lectures that are often treated as neutral, technocratic spaces. Yet students entering engineering programmes frequently experience the transition to university mathematics as isolating and emotionally demanding, with implications for their self-efficacy and sense of belonging. Ethics-of-care scholarship has argued that attentiveness, responsibility, competent help, responsiveness, and solidarity are central to just educational practice, but there is limited empirical work on how these forms of care are actually enacted in university mathematics classrooms.
Foundational courses such as first-year Real Analysis offer a critical site for making care visible in discourse, because lecture talk simultaneously models mathematical reasoning and relational norms. Emerging evidence suggests that teacher language and responsiveness shape students’ participation and sense of belonging, but we know little about how specific caring practices appear—or are withheld—in large lecture formats dominated by speed and content coverage, or how technocentric and masculinity norms guide these practices.
Against this backdrop, our project examines how first-year mathematics instructors discursively enact or silence care while teaching challenging concepts in mathematics. We video-record full lectures from multiple instructors, generate detailed time-aligned transcripts, and conduct stimulated-recall interviews in which instructors comment on selected classroom episodes. Using a framework based on Tronto’s phases of care and Noddings’s work on care in education, we apply critical discourse analysis to trace discourse moves and silences that signal attentiveness, responsibility, competent help, responsiveness, and solidarity.
The project is expected to yield an account of how care is woven into or absent from first-year mathematics lectures and to inform the design of care-informed teaching guidelines and professional development for university mathematics instructors, with the ultimate aim of supporting both conceptual understanding and relational wellbeing in the first year of study.
Contacts
- Vladislav Krivoshchekov, [email protected]
- Manuela Pineros-Rodriguez, [email protected]
- Roland Tormey, [email protected]
Dates and Funding
- Start date
- 01.04.2025
- End date
- 31.03.2027
- Funding
- SNSF