Doctor Elena Nardi
Nationality: Greece
Year: 1997
Subject Area: Social Sciences
Website: Visit (opens in a new window)I am now Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education at the University of East Anglia – and obtained a Wingate Scholarship in order to carry out a small follow-up to my doctoral study of Oxford mathematics undergraduates’ difficult encounter with mathematical formalism and abstraction at the beginning of their studies. In this the students’ tutors were invited to reflect upon samples of the doctorate’s findings as well as on general issues of undergraduate mathematics pedagogy in a series of semi-structured interviews. The richness of these interviews led to a series of studies (funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), Nuffield, LTSN (Learning and Teacher Support Network and HEA(Higher Education Academy)) which explored these issues further and established fruitful collaboration between mathematicians and mathematics educators (two communities with a notoriously difficult and fragile relationship). This work has been disseminated in many academic and professional outlets, culminating in the Springer monograph,'Amongst Mathematics: Teaching and Learning Mathematics at University level', 2007.