0000000000048274
AUTHOR
Hans Erik Borgersen
The Interplay Between Gesture and Discourse as Mediating Devices in Collaborative Mathematical Reasoning:A Multimodal Approach
This article aims to identify the mathematical reasoning strategies expressed through gestures and speech used by two groups of sixth-grade pupils when solving a task related to the transition between two semiotic representations: figure and Cartesian diagram. The article also identifies the difficulties the pupils meet in the solution process. The analyses of the group dialogues focus particularly on the gesture dimension of deixis. The pupils in both groups have used the following deictic gestures: pointing, held-point, linear point-slide, and circular point-slide in their solution process, while repeated pointing has been identified only in one of the groups. These pointing gestures are …
Professional mathematics teacher identity: analysis of reflective narratives from discourses and activities
Published verson of an article in the journal: Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10857-012-9216-1 This article focuses on the methodological use of reflective narratives from discourses and activities of an experienced primary teacher as evidence of her professional identity. The teacher’s reflective narratives emerge from her participation in a 3-year developmental and research project, Learning Communities in Mathematics, conducted at the University of Agder (UiA) in Norway. As background for our study, we firstly present the teacher in action with her sixth-grade pupils in a mathematics lesson, and then analyse sele…
Designed Examples as Mediating Tools: Introductory Algebra in Two Norwegian Grade 8 Classrooms
A critical element in the introduction of algebra is to focus student attention on the basic ideas of algebraic reasoning including the use of concepts such as variable and algebraic expression. In the Norwegian classrooms, representing a student-centered instructional philosophy, the teachers utilized examples and problems that they themselves had designed, and the examples involved resources such as concrete objects and body movements in order to make algebra accessible to students. When designing these examples, teachers thus used their own previous experiences of teaching algebra in an attempt to articulate the passage from arithmetic to algebra.