ABSTRACT
Introduction In her infl uential book comparing the mathematical subject knowledge of Chinese and US elementary school teachers, Liping Ma found that not only did the Chinese teachers know more mathematics but they possessed a different kind of understanding which she called ‘profound understanding of fundamental mathematics’. The teachers had far fewer years of learning mathematics than the US teachers but what they knew they ‘knew more profoundly, more fl exibly, more adaptively’. (Shulman, in Ma, 1999, p. xi). Despite having fewer years of schooling, the Chinese teachers had the opportunities to develop the understanding of what they were teaching throughout their careers, through serious deliberation and timetabled seminars. This deliberation was about the actual mathematics that they were teaching, not how to teach it.
