Curriculum Use While Learning to Teach: One Student Teacher’s Appropriation of Mathematics Curriculum Materials

This article describes one student teacher’s interactions with mathematics curriculum materials during her internship in a kindergarten classroom. Anne used curriculum materials from two distinct programs and taught lessons multiple times to different groups of children. Although she used each curriculum in distinct ways, her curriculum use was adaptive in both cases. Anne’s specific ways of reading, evaluating, and adapting the curriculum materials contrast with previous results about beginning teachers’ curriculum use. Several key factors appeared to contribute to Anne’s particular ways of using the curriculum materials: features of her student-teaching placement, her personal resources and background, and characteristics of the materials.