The research catalogue is an archive of ESRC-funded grants and outputs.
Links, files and other content will no longer be maintained or updated after April 2014.
Keeping Open the Door to Mathematically-Demanding F&HE Programmes
Grant reference: RES-139-25-0241
TLRP: Hybridity of maths and peers talk: crazy maths
Description
In this chapter we show how students’ collaboration regarding their work in class can sometimes facilitate a sociable 'community influenced' classroom mathematics talk. The social affordances of collaboration and indeed mathematics as a human, social activity have been examined by many others, although sometimes under the guise of equitable mathematics or inclusive mathematics pedagogy (Boaler, 2000, Boaler and Greeno, 2000, Nasir and Cobb, 2002, and many others) and earlier in the area of 'cooperative' classrooms. Such research has consistently pointed to the value of encouraging student-student interaction as a means to foster more positive identifications with mathematics, often for those who might be described as struggling learners (for example Boaler, ibid). This chapter provides an example of how classroom talk is fundamentally social and how students' sociality can be harnessed in ways to engender a living, more vibrant, and even synergetic kind of mathematics talk (cf. Yackel, Cobb, & Wood, 1999). We explore an example of students' everyday classroom talk, drawn from an AS mathematics classroom in a college in a provincial British town, which draws predominantly from a local white working class community. Especially we focus on an example of how an alternative ‘street-talk inflexed’ term for estimated mean comes into being during an episode when two students' explore together their alternative solutions, as they search for their error. Full text is availabe at the URL listed above.
