Cultural, Discursive Psychology: A Sociocultural Approach to Studying the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics

Abstract

From a sociocultural perspective an object of research on mathematics teaching and learning can be seen as a particular moment in the zoom of a lens. Researchers focus on a specific part of a complex process whilst taking account of the other views that would be obtained by pulling back or zooming in. Researching teaching and learning mathematics must be seen in the same way. Thus in zooming out researchers address the practices and meanings within which students become school-mathematical actors, whilst zooming in enables a study of mediation and of individual trajectories within the classroom. In each choice of object of research the range of other settings have to be incorporated into the analysis. Such analyses aim to embrace the complexity of the teaching-learning process. This article will present a cultural, discursive psychology for mathematics education that takes language and discursive practices as central in that meanings precede us and we are constituted within language and the associated practices, in the multiple settings within which we grow up and participate.