Abstract
The French tradition of research on the learning and teaching of mathematics, often referred to simply as didactique, has developed a range of theoretical tools. These tools share a common intellectual and professional hinterland, and although each is honed to analysis of particular types of didactical question, they have increasingly been used by French researchers in coordinated ways. As this movement towards a more systematically articulated didactique has developed within France, ideas from didactique have become sources of inspiration or points of reference for researchers outside France. Fresh questions have naturally arisen about the central concepts of didactique as new professional cultures and their associated intellectual traditions are encountered. At the Artigue colloquium, the last two authors of this chapter convened a round-table discussion to explore this issue. Each of the first four authors contributed by bringing a particular perspective inspired both by their professional contacts with Michèle Artigue and their own interests and experience.
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Notes
- 1.
“French syntax is incorruptible. It is from that that results this admirable clarity, the eternal foundation of our language. What is not clear is not French: What is not clear is still English, Italian, Greek, or Latin.”
- 2.
Chevallard argues in favor of using didactics in English rather than didactique. I agree with his position but have used didactique in this paper in the spirit of the panel to which it contributes.
- 3.
Our role [i.e., the teachers’ role] is extremely serious, it is fundamental, because it is a matter of making possible and accelerating the progress of the whole of Humanity. Thus conceived of, from this general viewpoint, we see our duty in a new light. It is no longer a matter of the individual, but of society.
- 4.
The constrains that govern these [educational] geneses are not identical to those that governed the historical genesis, but the latter remains nonetheless, for the didactician, an anchoring point, a kind of observational promontory when the question is to analyze a certain process of teaching, or a working base if the question is to elaborate such a genesis.
- 5.
Epistemological obstacles “are those to which knowledge cannot and must not escape, because of their constitutive role in the target knowledge.”
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Arcavi, A., Boero, P., Kilpatrick, J., Radford, L., Dreyfus, T., Ruthven, K. (2016). Didactique Goes Travelling: Its Actual and Potential Articulations with Other Traditions of Research on the Learning and Teaching of Mathematics. In: Hodgson, B., Kuzniak, A., Lagrange, JB. (eds) The Didactics of Mathematics: Approaches and Issues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26047-1_2
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