The devil’s finest trick: routines that make teachers matter against their better judgement

ABSTRACT

Once teaching-learning events are conceptualized as inter-discursive encounters, it becomes clear that mathematics classroom talk is rife with invisible pitfalls. There are many types of unacknowledged discursive gaps, some of them necessary for learning and some potentially harmful. Such gaps may exist also between the teacher’s intentions and her habitual moves, most of which are too brief and automatic to be controlled. Unbeknown to the teacher, her basic communicational routines may deprive her students of proper learning opportunities. Some seemingly innocent teaching routines may also constitute invisible crevices through which prejudice and injustice enter the conversation on mathematical objects. In this talk, I argue that if the devil is in the finest detail of classroom communication, it is the detail that must be considered in the attempts to exorcise the devil. I begin with illustrations of these claims and conclude with a reflection on what teachers can do to sensitize themselves to discursive pitfalls and to eradicate or change those routines that carry the greatest risks.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• routine
• miscommunication
• teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some researchers today reject the ‘teleological’ conceptualization of education, one that aims at specific outcomes. For instance, several proponents of ‘dialogic’ teaching claim that learning should ‘define … its own emergent endpoints’ (Matusov & Miyazaki, 2014). This position is rather extreme and cannot (yet?) be seen as mainstream.

2. Commognition is a theoretical framework for the study of teaching-learning processes. It is grounded in the assumption that what is popularly known as ‘domains of knowledge’ – mathematics, science, history etc. – can be usefully conceptualized as discourses, that is, different kinds of communication, specially designed for telling potentially useful stories about diverse aspects of reality. Here, thinking and communication become a single category, and thus the portmanteau ‘commognition’. The discourses, and the narratives they generate, are made distinct by the objects they deal with. Thus, objects of the discourse known as physics are material bodies, of the one known as biology – living organisms, of history – past events, and so on. For elaboration see, e.g. Sfard (2008).

3. As stated by Barsalou (2020), ‘one central theme of the grounded approach is that cognition emerges from interactions between classic cognitive processes, the modalities, the body, the physical environment, and the social environment’ (p. 3). With its authors’ refusal to speak about human growth in terms of nature/nurture dichotomy, the theory of grounded cognition has been revolutionizing the onto-epistemological foundations of brain sciences ever since its inception in the later 1990s. It is thus not surprising that this approach has been gaining traction among sociocultural thinkers, most of whom, until recently, had been quite sceptical about the power of neuroscience to account for all things human. Indeed, the theory of grounded cognition seems free from those faults of the traditional brain science that attracted most criticism: its reductionism and its nativist leanings.

4. This assertion is grounded in yet another, more basic assumption, according to which our experiences, rather than being just symbolical encoded in our brains, are stored in our memory in the forms in which they originally took place. In other words, they are recorded in visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and other perceptual modalities.

5. This diagram brings to mind Barsalou’s (2020) five-phase Situated Action Cycle, or SAC, for short—the sequence of perceptual, cognitive, emotional and physical developments underlying each of our actions. It is noteworthy that the direct, discursively unmediated recruitment of routine is what we often witness in familiar task-situations involving only primary (unnamed) objects. Think, for instance, about a baby that baulks at a sight of the stove that she once touched when it was hot.

6. For our present purpose, the term ‘discourse’ signifies a special type of communication, made distinct by its vocabulary, the objects or symbols that are used as visual mediators, routines performed by its participants and narratives the participants endorse.

7. ‘[D]egeneracy refers to the fact that the same brain function can be supported by different neural networks … , hence the same behaviour may be supported by distinct brain processes’. (DodelEm et al., 2020).

8. See, for instance, the special routines for money transaction developed by Brazilian street vendors, as documented in the study by Nunes et al. (1993). See also analogous findings in Lave (1988) and in Scribner (1997).