About
Information about our project.
General Information
The main goal of the project FunThink is to support teachers and students with regard to functional thinking. Altogether, 6 core partner institutions and further associated partners from 5 European countries collaborate to achieve this goal. Ludwigsburg University of Education coordinates this project.
FunThink is co-funded by the Erasmus+ program "Strategic Partnerships" with a budget of 443.543€. It is scheduled from September 2020 to August 2024.
Project Description
Functional thinking as thinking in relationships, dependencies and changes is highly relevant in many contexts within and beyond mathematics. The team members share the common vision that (mathematics) education can be significantly improved by enhancing functional thinking. For this purpose, effective teaching-learning-settings as well as adequate pre- and in-service teacher education are crucial.
To achieve this common goal the project objectives are:
1
Learning environments for school
The development of digital-embodied and situated learning environments for inquiry that can be implemented in mathematics classrooms from primary to upper secondary school in order to support students’ functional thinking.
As stated above, the main goal of this project is to improve functional thinking in a transnational perspective drawing on the partners’ specific and complementary expertise. Therefore, one of the project’s objectives is to develop digital-embodied and situated learning environments for inquiry that can be implemented in mathematics classrooms from primary to upper secondary school in order to support students’ functional thinking. They will be worked out – alongside with extensive teacher guides – in the sense of a comprehensive learning trajectory, i. e., they will enhance functional thinking in a coherent and continuous way bridging between different school grades, and hence, overcoming teaching different function classes and aspects in an isolated, non-interrelated way.
2
(Pre-service) teacher course
The implementation of a corresponding pre-service teacher course to enable pre-service teachers to effectively enhance their future students’ functional thinking through these learning environments.
A further project objective is the conception of a corresponding pre-service teacher course intended to enable pre-service teachers to effectively enhance their future students’ functional thinking through these learning environments. Particularly edited classroom videos showing the implementation of the learning environments will encourage the reflection and professional exchange between the course participants about supporting students’ functional thinking – an important prerequisite for their future professional success.
3
Digital platform
Enhancing the reflection, transnational interaction and professional exchange by launching an open educational, interactive and multilingual digital platform equipped with the project outcomes.
In order to enlarge the beneficiaries of the project outputs, the third project objective is to launch an open educational, interactive and multilingual digital platform equipped with the project outcomes. An integrated user forum will offer possibilities for teachers, teacher educators and researchers to engage in transnational interaction, exchange ideas and experiences, discuss practices and learn from each other with regard to functional thinking and beyond. In particular, the digital platform will provide mathematics teacher educators from all over Europe and beyond with extensive support for adopting our innovative course concept in their local teacher courses.