The Swedish national curriculum, as well as the related syllabuses for each subject, from the 1990’s is a curriculum with two kinds of goals: goals to strive for – open goals, left for the teachers to interpret – and goals to attain, intended as basis for evaluation of the schools. However, the teachers did not work with the open goals. Instead, both research (Eriksson, Arvola Orlander & Jedemark, 2004) evaluations showed that goals to attain were those who guided the teachers’ work. Thereby the content made available for the students has been reduced to what was required for the pass grade. A collaborative research project, aiming at developing and exploring ways of working in relation to the open goals to strive for was initiated. During the first year of the project eight teachers from four schools (grades 1- 6) in one of Stockholm’s suburbs engaged in the project. During the second semester of the project, which is the focus of this paper, the teachers collaboratively designed a sequence of experimental teaching in mathematics, focusing volume and measurement of volume as mathematical content knowledge. The sequence was executed in four classrooms with two teachers in each. The basic theoretical assumption is that these contribute to shaping the mathematical content; they determine the ways in which students are engaged in mathematical activities and thereby what is made available for them to learn. Activity theory is the overall theoretical framework for this paper (Leont’ev, 1978), whereas a more detailed coding and analysis of the classroom interaction has been inspired by Kress et.al. (2001), Roth (1996), Johansson (2002) and Lindberg (2003).

Three of these sequences of experimental teaching were audio- and video-recorded, the fourth was only audio-recorded (and thereby has been of limited use). Further digital photos were used for documentation and copies of the paper material teachers handed out to the students were collected. In this paper, the issue is firstly to provide a comparative description of what mathematical content was made available for the students to learn in these four classrooms. For this analysis, the focus has been on the assignments given to the students in each classroom, how these assignments were introduced, what tools and material the students were expected to use (as well as those they used), how they were used, and on the classroom interaction between teachers and students. For this purpose, audio- and video-recordings were transcribed.

On a general level, the project illuminates the strong impact of teaching traditions and practices, in Sweden dominated by a textbook driven teaching practice and ideals of supporting children – sometimes at the cost of content learning. On a more detailed level, the small differences in tools and material used in the four classrooms were of significant importance for the students’ understanding of what was expected of them. Also differences in classroom interaction – language as well as other signs used in interaction between teachers and students, contributed to somewhat different focus of mathematical content – in that respect what Newman, Griffin and Cole (1989) say about the problems of implementing “the same assignment” in different classrooms is verified. If, however, it is not a matter of the “same content” but instead of the same forms of knowledge and knowing (Carlgren & Marton, 2001), the differences found in these classrooms are minor.