Should departments of mathematics be seriously involved in preparing future teachers, for example, by offering service courses that focus more on the process of doing mathematics?

There is evidence over the past several decades that many, if not most, teacher candidates enter B.Ed. programs with a view of mathematics as rule-based, rote, and disconnected. This is especially true for students who did not major in mathematics and who often have mathematics as a second teachable, having taken, in mathematics, mostly what are called “service courses.” These are often the teachers who go on to teach Grades 9 and 10, a critical stage in students’ mathematical development.

Should university mathematics departments take these concerns seriously and, particularly in these service courses, focus more on mathematics as an open playground with an invitation to work creatively with beautiful structures? Or should that work remain primarily in the hands of education specialists?

Bios

Wesley Burr is an Associate Professor and serves as the Chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Trent University. He completed his degrees at Queen's University, graduating with a PhD in statistics in 2012, having worked with Dr. David J. Thomson (now retired). He has been recognized for his commitment to teaching through a number of teaching awards, both at Trent and externally, including the 2024-25 OCUFA Teaching Award and the 2025-26 CMS Excellence in Teaching Award. At Trent, Wesley has been responsible for major curriculum rebuilding across mathematics and statistics, and is passionate about high-quality introductory teaching in mathematics, statistics and the sciences.

Ami Mamolo is an Associate Professor at Ontario Tech University and co-Director of the Centre for Mathematics Education at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Her research explores how to foster and elicit reasoning that can disrupt misguided and ingrained preconceptions about mathematics content, learning, and teaching.

Sarah Mayes‑Tang is a professor, mathematician, and educator at the University of Toronto. She grew up in southwestern Ontario with a love of reading and learning about nearly everything. As an undergraduate at Queen’s, she chose to major in mathematics because she could not imagine stopping her study of the subject. That feeling persisted through graduation, leading her to complete a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. Sarah next joined the faculty at Quest University Canada, where she modeled what an undergraduate education might look like if reimagined from the ground up. In 2017, she joined the University of Toronto, where her educational work focuses on bringing innovative and inclusive mathematics education to scale and her scholarly work is about women in mathematics. Her respect for K–12 teachers has deepened over her seventeen-year marriage to a committed high school math and physics teacher.

Cameron Morland received a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Science from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University. He has taught courses in problem solving, Euclidean geometry, geometry for computer graphics, number theory, calculus, data structures and algorithms, and compilers, and he helps run a math camp for elementary teachers. His focus is on developing deeper understanding through rich interactions with topics that might, at first glance, seem simple.

Sa’diyya Parnell-Hendrickson is a PhD candidate in Mathematics Education at the University of Toronto and an Ontario Certified Teacher (Grades 7–12). After specializing in mathematics as an undergraduate, she turned to mathematics education to address how the subject’s hidden demands (linguistic, logical, strategic, and cumulative) create significant barriers for students. She created LEAP in Math™ (Learn Efficiently, Actively, and Purposefully), a holistic, learner-centred framework that supports students, families, and educators across the full math learning ecosystem. It helps repair students’ relationships with mathematics and equips them with research-informed practices to retain prior knowledge so future learning is possible. With over a decade of teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto and 20+ years supporting learners from elementary through university, her research integrates mathematics education, cognitive psychology, and curriculum studies to address inequities in the mathematics curriculum.