Designing Manipulatives as Microworld-Making: A Reflective Approach to Enhancing a Course through Pre-Service Teachers’ Contributions

This paper establishes a foundation for a teacher education course through a reflective approach to its development, viewing it as a dynamic process shaped by students’ experiences, knowledge construction, and manipulative design. This perspective reimagines teacher education beyond content delivery, promoting a vision in which both teacher educators and pre-service teachers are simultaneously practitioners, designers, and learners. Consistent with constructionist principles, the study analyses the design work of one student to explore how her contributions informed refinements to course structure and pedagogical framing. The pre-service teacher’s manipulative is examined through the lens of Symbolically Structured Environments (SSEs) – conceptually aligned with microworlds – highlighting how physical action interacts with mathematical symbols to deepen understanding. Framing manipulative design as microworld-making, the second iteration of the course incorporated key SSE elements to empower pre-service teachers to design manipulative that actively engage students in mathematical thinking.