It is the objective of this project to develop, evaluate, revise, finalise, publish and disseminate ready-to-use teaching units in mathematics for primary, lower and upper secondary level schools, specifically designed for migrant students. It is also the objective of this project to develop and evaluate teaching unit concepts (scaffolds or outlines that contain a theoretical framework and anchor points; they can then be used to create full-fledged teaching units for specific classrooms, with various contexts and mathematical topics). It is another objective to let mathematics teachers create and teach concrete teaching units (based on the teaching unit concepts) for their specific classrooms, and for mathematics educators to observe, record and evaluate the teaching, analyse the different strategies teachers used to turn the given concepts into teaching units, and create “good practice” guidelines from that. It is finally the objective to organize and execute a final international conference, regional workshops, and teacher training events in partner and non-parnter countries.
The multicultural nature of classrooms is a significant challenge in many European countries. Teachers are usually not sufficiently prepared to deal with a classroom context with pupils having a migrant background, coming from countries with different cultures and different languages. Teaching materials focusing on migrant students do exist, but mostly for languages, not for mathematics. Mathematics teachers feel the necessity for training and materials which reflect the needs of their students in terms of linguistic and cultural differences. Their students with a migrant background encounter specific difficulties in acquiring fundamental maths skills. The seven partners of this project are four teacher training and research institutions and three schools. They developed ready-to-use teaching units and concepts for teaching units; teachers in partner schools applied these concepts to create concrete teaching units and taught those units. Partners then created case studies, summarizing the strategies teachers used to make the units work for their migrant and non-migrant students. This gives mathematics teachers a guideline with possible strategies, as well as information how other teachers turned the concepts into concrete units.