Primary teachers' initial training in mathematics education in Spain, 1991-2010

Spain participated in TEDS-M 2008, a comparative study of teacher education with a focus on the preparation of teachers of mathematics at the primary and lower secondary levels. As a national option, Spain decided to look only into primary teacher education. One of the interests of the study was the analysis of the teacher education syllabi implemented by the participating countries'. This analysis was performed on three levels: national, institutional, and educator. For each of these levels, we analyzed Spanish curriculum documents that refer to national, institutional and educators' syllabi. Three knowledge domains related to mathematics education were used for analyzing these documents: school mathematics, tertiary mathematics, education pedagogy, and mathematics pedagogy. In this paper, we describe the structure and content of the primary teacher education syllabi that were in force in Spain between 1991 and 2010, centered in mathematics education. The data for the study was collected from a representative sample of 48 Spanish primary teacher education institutions. The results show that Spanish syllabi for mathematics education, although diverse among institutions, have a common curricular structure for the three levels of analysis. We were able to establish a core curriculum at the educator's level characterized by the absence of tertiary mathematics and the predominance of pedagogical aspects. The results of this study suggest the need for giving more attention to mathematics pedagogy and school mathematics in primary teacher education syllabi.