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Abstract
Balancing content and students' participation in the mathematics classroom is an area of both practical and theoretical interest. In this article we relate and contribute to these two interests by analyzing classroom data from an intervention project aiming at teaching mathematics through problem solving. The study shows that several aspects such as mediating tools, the teacher's conceptual accountability and interactional moves play important roles in the nature of the co-construction of critical dimensions of variation. We therefore suggest that an analysis of content and participation in the mathematics classroom would benefit from drawing on several theoretical sources. As such, the study could be seen as a contribution to recent elaborations on developing variation theory for analyzing the enacted object of learning.
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Notes
1Discourse is defined here as an interaction (cf. Linell, Citation1998), and the words discourse and interaction will be used interchangeably. Ryve (Citation2011) presents an analysis of different ways of using the concept of discourse in mathematics education research.
2Content should here be understood as mathematical proficiencies (Kilpatrick, Swafford, & Findell, Citation2001) or competencies (Niss & Jensen, Citation2002) related to all kinds of content domains within mathematics like geometry, probability, and algebra. This is discussed further below.
3The words aspects and features are used interchangeably.
4As she also expressed in interviews.
5The figures are part of the problem and should not be confused with and of this article.
6The third figure of the mosaic pattern was agreed upon to consist of 7 times 7 tiles with black tiles in the diagonals.
7A conventional way of writing mathematical expressions is 3x + 1 instead of x·3 + 1.