Reinventing Realistic Mathematics Education at Berkeley—Emergence and Development of a Course for Pre-service Teachers

A central principle of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) is that learners experience guided opportunities to reconstruct cultural practices and artefacts in the course of attempting to solve engaging problems using emerging resources as structuring tools. The same principle plays out at the meta level, across ages, geography, and functions, where instructors experience opportunities to reinvent RME as they adapt its principles to satisfy specific design constraints and local needs. This chapter recounts a collaborative effort to create at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, graduate and undergraduate courses for pre-service mathematics teachers that incorporates tenets of RME, while accommodating to prescribed and emerging constraints of local contexts, such as stipulation of federal funding, as well as the collective histories and prior schooling experiences of pre-service teachers, most of whom are encountering this didactical approach for the first time.