There is a well-established area of work in mathematics education focusing on mathematics for social justice. Much of the work, however, is concerned with "individual" students' understanding the world symbolically -- as evident in the notions of reading and writing the world using mathematics -- while failing to address a transformative…

Recent theoretical advances on learning (mathematics) emphasize the fact that what results from engagement with curriculum materials is not entirely in the control of the students in the way classical theories of knowing and learning suggest. These new theories distinguish themselves by either invoking distributed agency, some of which is…

The dominant learning paradigms conceive of learning as the construction of something, which, depending on the particular bent of the researcher, may be "meaning", "knowledge", "conceptions", or "conceptual frameworks". However, some recent studies conducted from very different theoretical perspectives…

Situated learning theories such as communities of practice provide a rich conceptual framework for analyzing the processes by which newcomers become full participants in the communities they enter. However, some research shows that these concepts have shortcomings for theorizing learning in formal educational settings especially when it comes to…

In most epistemologies, practical actions and speech are the consequences of thought. In this study, I provide three case studies of highly educated scientists producing aspects of graphs only to erase these as soon as they have been drawn. The case studies are consistent with an alternative approach, already formulated by L. S. Vygotsky and M.…

Standard approaches to thinking in the mathematics curriculum depict it as the result of some stable constructions in the mind of the person, constructions that are the results of individual efforts in the mind of subjects or of collective efforts that are then appropriated by and into the mind of individuals. Such work does not appreciate what…

Although the importance of understanding the social and cultural processes mediating pre-service teachers' expansion of the power to act has been increasingly recognized lately, the way the concept of "agency" is portrayed in most of the studies focuses almost exclusively on the subject of activity and therefore, there is insufficient…

Traditional (e.g., constructivist) accounts of knowledge ground its origin in the "intentional construction" on the part of the learner. Such accounts are blind to the fact that learners, by the fact that they do not know the knowledge to be learned, cannot orient toward it as an object to be constructed. In this study, I provide a…

The idea that mathematical knowledge is embodied is increasingly taking hold in the mathematics education literature. Yet there are challenges to the existing conceptualizations: There tend to be breaks between (a) the living and experienced body (flesh) and linguistic forms of thought, (b) individual and collective forms of knowing, and (c) the…

Argumentation as a form of introducing children to science has received increasing attention over the past decade. Argumentation tends to be studied and theorized through the lens of individual speakers, who contribute to a conversation by means of opposing statements. M.M. Bakhtin and L.S. Vygotsky independently proposed a very different approach…

Lecturing is an important aspect of the culture of science education. Perhaps because of the negative associations constructivist educators make with lecturing, little research has been done concerning the generally invisible aspects of the (embodied, lived) "work" that is required. Traditional research on science lectures focuses on…

Purpose: This study aims to contribute to current research on team learning patterns. It specifically addresses some negative perceptions of the job performance learning pattern. Design/methodology/approach: Over a period of three years, qualitative and quantitative data were gathered on pilot learning in the workplace. The instructional modes…

Background/Context: Two key uses of international assessments of achievement have been (a) comparing country performances for identifying the countries with the best education systems and (2) generating insights about effective policy and practice strategies that are associated with higher learning outcomes. Do country rankings really reflect the…

This study examines the origins of geometry in and out of the intuitively given everyday lifeworlds of children in a second-grade mathematics class. These lifeworlds, though pre-geometric, are not without model objects that denote and come to anchor geometric idealities that they will understand at later points in their lives. Roth's analyses…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…