We are working hard in Cambodia to implement STEM education countrywide, and part of this journey implied conceiving a model for “STEM lessons” that has some chances to reach the teachers in their current context while opening room for more subject integration in the next years. This is what we present in the book chapter that was just accepted for a book called STEM Education – Recent Trend and New Advances. Chan Roath and I are pretty happy about it!  

It’s been a few months now that I’ve been working on the notion of examples in order to analyze some of our data, in part with the help of Jacob Chartray who is doing a great job! I will present some of that work at the next MES conference in Brasil in July. I am really looking forward to seeing some of you there! The title of the paper is: The ambiguous nature of examples, and its potential for mathematical activity.

Sometimes things go fast! I am very happy to annonce that we finished the creation of the (first version) of our website for the Cambodian Mentoring Journal! You can already visit and read two articles of the 2023 issue! The current address is www.cmj.uqam.ca. There is still a lot of work to do on and around it, but that’s great start.

I cannot report on everything we are doing here in Cambodia, but these are exciting times for sure and I am very happy to be part of it! This week, we created the basis of the Cambodia Mathematics Teachers Association. This is just the beginning, but we really hope the group will play a role in improving mathematics education in the country by allowing teachers to connect, share their work, their concerns, their ideas and so on. The group is supported by the Cambodian Mathematical Society (for which I am an “international advisor” (!). One of our hope is to …

STEM education is growing strong in Cambodia, and we are organizing a special forum with speakers from Thailand and Singapore in addition to Cambodian to work together in order to identify key element for the design and implementation of a large scale STEM Mentoring program in Cambodia! It is taking place in Phnom Penh, on April 4th and 5th. With Dr. Catherine Prammer, I will myself do a short presentation/discussion on the STEM Excellence Pathway that was discussed in a previous CICME conference. Have a look at the webpage: www.tiny.cc/cambodiaSTEMforum

I had a great time at the Cambodia National Education Conference, talking for nearly an hour in front of 800 zoom attendees about “New emphasis” for Mathematics Education in the 21st Century. That was not an easy topic, but I think I managed to do a decent job presenting some of the most likely coming changes, and some of should still remain good teaching practices that can be relevant to the Cambodian context. That was a lot of fun anyways!

I had this week a nice invitation from Pr. Beverly J. Irby from Texas A&M University’s College of Education to discuss with a class of PhD students about Epistemology and Ethics. I think we all enjoyed it a lot. Here is a bit of what I brought to the table!