During my PGCE, I first learnt of the existence of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM), a subject association recommended to me and my peers - by, I suspect, Dave Hewitt - as an organisation for which membership was desirable; for me this was an understatement, as ATM opened up a wealth of other influences, experiences and professional development almost immediately and for many years afterwards. From regularly attending the annual Easter conference after my first in 2009, reading its professional journal Mathematics Teaching, attending local branch meetings, participating in a working group and perhaps above all else meeting other members of the mathematics education community, this membership greatly developed me outside of the schools in which I have worked and I am thankful that a body with clear aims and guiding principles I believed in existed to provide me with a professionally nurturing home. I also aimed to be active in supporting this body, serving on its General and Executive Councils, offering sessions at the national conference and the Birmingham branch, and also learning about its history and notable figures with the aim to help keep the past alive in the present.
I would be surprised if it is not obvious by this point that I consider Dave Hewitt to be my biggest inspiration and influence, and so it should also be no surprise that I was interested in those he cited. Initially through him and later the ATM, I learnt about the work of Caleb Gattegno, an educator whose hand was seemingly felt through everyone I encountered professionally in my own time, including and especially the ATM as Gattegno was one of the founding members of ATM’s forerunner, the Association for Teaching Aids in Mathematics. I thus realised that Gattegno’s work and philosophies were worth studying for my own development, and that remains true today for both myself and more learned colleagues. There will be much writing to come here which is inspired by or follows Gattegno.
Beyond those already named I am lucky to have encountered and worked with many others who have influenced and shaped me, who I am sure I will name and recognise in the future and whose work will be in the background if not foreground of my writings here. Many of these educators remain active today, whilst some are retired and others have left us. I believe we can continue to learn a great deal from the past as well as the present, and one of my underlying aims here is to cast a light on previous work in an effort to help it remain relevant today. In that nature, I would like to end this piece of writing with a recommendation for a book I first read early in my career and aim to re-read every few years, that always provides me with inspiration, reminders and energy: How Children Fail, by John Holt. Holt passed away more than twenty years before I trained to be a teacher, and so I can only hope that my thanks are received in a spiritual sense: may we all be so wise as to produce work whose impact can still be felt many years after we are gone. I consider the writing of Holt, along with that of the pathologist Richard Shepherd, to be the standard to which I aim for my own to one day come close to reaching. This is a lofty ideal, but if our successes are not to be limited then our aims and ambitions must be far extending.
Next: in the final part of this introduction, the aims and guiding principles which govern both me as a practitioner and the writing I will produce.
---
Comments, questions and concerns welcome
Bluesky account: @dmlawrence.bsky.social
©2025 David M. Lawrence.
All rights reserved.
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.