Educational Insights | Volume 8, Number 2, 2003 | Helena Miranda | Teaching and Learning Mathematics Through Discourse

Opening thoughts This paper is an extension of a piece that I recently presented as part of a collective project[2] at the Provoking Curriculum Conference (Miranda, 2003). The collective project mainly grappled with a question of what counts as knowing, learning or teaching. This prompted me to question what counts as knowing in discourses that arise in mathematics classrooms. Here, I explore the aspect of mathematics classroom discourses by looking at the question of what one may pay attention to when observing such discourses. First, I present a summary of evidence on mathematics educators’ and researchers’ interests in teaching and learning mathematics through discourse. I also discuss the motive behind the researchers’ interests—i.e. why we should encourage discourses in mathematics classrooms. Second, I look at mathematics students’ coparticipation in classroom discourses as one of the ways in which they may be actively engaged in generating mathematical knowledge. Third and lastly, I present a view of learning as a collective activity. I look at how this view can help in understanding the discourses that spontaneously emerge in the mathematics classroom and in understanding the autopoietic nature of a classroom.