Identifying Cyclic Patterns of Interaction to Study Individual and Collective Learning

Abstract

Our analysis of a college level mathematics course for prospective secondary mathematics teachers revealed that each student developed, at least to some degree, a conceptual orientation for teaching mathematics (A. G. Thompson, Philipp, Thompson, & Boyd, 1994). This initial finding led to a more in-depth question: If we assume an emergent perspective (Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995; Cobb & Yackel, 1996) in which the values, practices, and social motivations of the classroom are believed to play critical roles in students' conceptual development, what social aspects emerged that supported these individual constructions? To address this question, we documented the emergence of a collective conceptual orientation and then used this construct to explore the reflexivity between its emergence and individual students' development of conceptual orientations.