Resource Design for Re-sourcing Teaching

In this handbook chapter, we suggest that in designing resources for mathematics education, it is important that the designers explicitly contemplate whether and how the resources contribute to teaching. We guide the readers in considering how instructional design practices and the resulting resources always convey a specific positioning of the teacher within the educational process and expectations of teaching as a profession at large. We draw on conceptualizations of teaching as a complex endeavor in proposing that designing for supporting mathematical learning directly is insufficient. We then discuss two design research examples in which designing for teaching was overtly taken as a goal, and where digital resources played a role. We use these examples to derive three types of design tasks that, we propose, characterize designing for teaching: designing for resource relevance and clarity to the teacher and for resource viability in the teacher’s classroom. We comment on contributions of digital resources to these tasks.