Session Information
24 SES 09, Characterising the Structure of the Pedagogical Language of Mathematics Teachers and Researchers in Australia, China and the Czech Republic
Symposium
Contribution
All three presentations in this symposium report analyses conducted as part of The International Classroom Lexicon Project. The Lexicon Project involves research teams from Australia, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Spain/Catalunya and the USA. The project aims to document the naming systems employed by different communities, speaking different languages, to describe the events, actions and interactions of the mathematics classroom.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that our lived experience is mediated significantly by our capacity to name and categorize our world.
We see and hear . . . very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (Sapir, 1949, p. 162).
Marton and Tsui (2004) suggest that categories “not only express the social structure but also create the need for people to conform to the behavior associated with these categories” (Marton & Tsui, 2004, p. 28). Our interactions with classroom settings, whether as learners, teachers, or researchers, are mediated by our capacity to name what we see and experience. Speakers of one language have access to terms, and therefore to perceptive possibilities, that may not be available to speakers of another language. This has implications for international comparative research (Clarke, 2013).
Any claim that researchers speaking different languages are analyzing “the same classroom,” even when working from the same video records, can be usefully contested. For example, in two published translations of Vygotsky (discussed in Clarke 2001), we find the Russian term, “obuchenie,” represented as “instruction” in one translation and “learning” in another. As educational research increasingly employs English as the primary language through which theory is composed and disseminated, it is essential to recognise the contructs that other cultures have employed in conceptualising their practice.
In the Lexicon Project, local teams of researchers and experienced teachers in each country, classify a common set of video records of mathematics lessons, drawn from all participating countries. The initial purpose of this activity is to identify those terms in their local language that in combination constitute the national pedagogical lexicon, by which teachers and researchers discuss, analyse, reflect upon and theorise about the mathematics classroom. Of particular interest are the connections identified between terms and the consequent clusters of related terms that provide the structure for each lexicon. These clusters and the structures they represent constitute the major focus of this symposium.
This project also examines the similarities and differences in these national lexicons, revealing significant differences in the way teachers and researchers from each country interface with the classrooms that are the focus of their professional activity. These differences raise the question of the extent to which the international community of mathematics teachers and researchers can meaningfully and productively share the wisdom of long-established pedagogical traditions of practice, where these are encrypted in the naming systems by which each community identifies those classroom activities that it considers to be significant.
In this symposium, one English speaking and two non-English speaking communities provide contrasting examples of the language that mathematics teachers in Australia, China and the Czech Republic employ to describe the objects and events of the middle school mathematics classrooms in their countries. Most importantly, each presentation explores the implications of structural aspects of the lexicon that suggest underlying pedagogical principles or associations that shape the ways in which middle school mathematics teachers function and interact within the mathematics classrooms of that country. Significant insight is also offered into the language available to researchers in each country, by which they study, classify, analyse, conjecture and theorize about the practices and the affordances of the mathematics classrooms of their country.
References
Clarke, D.J. (2001). Teaching/Learning. Chapter 12 in D. J. Clarke (Ed.). Perspectives on practice and meaning in mathematics and science classrooms. Kluwer Academic Press: Dordrecht, Netherlands, 291-320. Clarke, D. J. (2013). International comparative research into educational interaction: Constructing and concealing difference. In K. Tirri & E. Kuusisto (Eds.) Interaction in Educational Settings, (pp. 5-22), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Marton, F. & Tsui, A.B.M. (2004). Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning. Mahway NJ: Erlbaum. Sapir, E. (1949). Selected writings on language, culture and personality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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