Years of failed attempts to engage my mathematics teacher students in exploration and co-creation led me to radically change my teaching approach. Inspired by literature that uses the jazz improv metaphor for teaching, I derived three tenets based on principles from jazz improv. First, I would bring no more than a single problem-solving task to…

The author has been influenced throughout his time in mathematics education by the work of Caleb Gattegno. Gattegno made extensive use of the word awareness whereas much educational literature from a psychological perspective talks about memory (for example, Justicia-Galiano, MartÌn-Puga, Linares & Pelegrina, 2017). This has, amongst other…

In this article we address the 'educationalization' of authentic marine navigation tasks for upper secondary mathematics classrooms and their potential for students' learning. Our approach is based on boundary crossing and as well as on the distinction between realistic tasks (targeting students' familiarization with the marine navigation…

Mathematical writing in school is difficult to teach. Reasons include that it is a domain in which there are rules for some parts of the writing like for example mathematical notation while others must be negotiated locally in the classroom. Writing is also seldom separated from the process of solving mathematical problems, creating a situation…

The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of introducing the general notions of function and inverse function through a mathematical activity on linear functions, focusing on the quantitative meaning associated to the connection between a relation and its inverse. We present a genetic decomposition, that is, a viable cognitive path for…

With the proliferation of video-based professional development (PD) courses for mathematics teachers, understanding the role of the facilitators of these courses has become an emerging field of theoretical and empirical study. The purpose of this article is to address some of the challenges and opportunities that facilitation of discussions…

In this article, I argue that the common practice across many school mathematics curricula of using a variety of different representations of number may diminish the coherence of mathematics for students. Instead, I advocate prioritising a single representation of number (the number line) and applying this repeatedly across diverse content areas.…

This paper problematizes the metaphors of unpacking, deconstructing, and decompressing mathematics that are prevalent in discourses about mathematics teacher knowledge. It is argued that the logic of these metaphors is based on the reversibility of packing, constructing, and compressing mathematics and seems to suggest the view that knowledge is…

The main aim of this paper is to propose a critical view of the application of Toulmin's model of argument to mathematics education, focusing on aspects that have strong teaching implications. It is claimed that Toulmin's description of arguments in mathematics, in particular as regards the relations between form and meaning, is misleading and out…

Shulman (1986) conceptualized pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) at the intersection of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. In this paper, I re-explore the intersection of content--in our case, mathematics--and pedagogy, not in terms of domains of knowledge, but in terms of domains of practice. I conceptualize, describe, and exemplify…

Research in mathematics education constantly oscillates between theoretical or 'Is' questions and practical or 'Ought' questions: Researchers are not only pursuing theoretical questions by investigating what those involved in the teaching and learning of mathematics do, but they are also working on practical recommendations for what they ought to…

This meditation on subjectivity draws on mundane and explicitly political contexts to argue for mathematics education practices that help us understand how people use mathematics to shape our world. I use two contexts to consider how to develop citizens who understand how we are subjugated by mathematical systems (designed and sustained by…

Critical to constructing and interpreting graphs is an individual's understanding of the underlying coordinate systems, yet coordinate systems are often overlooked or taken-for-granted in both mathematics education research and curricula. In this paper, we foreground coordinate systems and present a distinction between two uses of coordinate…

L.V. Zankov (1901-1977), a student and colleague of Vygotsky, developed a system of developmental education for elementary education through 20 years of extensive research. Since 2009, a number of Norwegian schools have been using textbooks in mathematics based on Zankov's system. In this article, we present and discuss the experiences of some…

Planning lessons and in-the-moment improvising during enactment of the plan are two central activities inherent to the practice of teaching. To what extent are these pursuits conflicting or inconsistent? What are the characteristics of improvisation during teaching and what are teachers' possible stances on it? We discuss these questions based on…