Abstract
Within the ‘social turn’ in mathematics education research, it is the work of Vygotsky, more than any other inspiration, that has provided many researchers with theoretical tools for interpreting the social origins of thinking and learning. In his short 38 years, Vygotsky became a pioneering psychologist. In his view, thinking can be explained from a developmental perspective by linking higher mental functions to their origin. At the heart of a child’s psychological development, accordingly, was the child’s social development. Vygotsky emphasized the importance of social interaction in human development and undertook laboratory work that explored how, in interactions with others, a child develops new ways of thinking and being and, in the process, new social mechanisms are developed. Put another way, he sought to find out how, through new complex mental function interrelations, new patterned ways of the child’s behaviour are formed.
This chapter discusses a number of concepts central to Vygotsky’s work. We explore the development of shared understanding as a joint activity between the mutual achievement of teacher and students: as an outcome of what is made possible and what is ‘taken up’ within the classroom environment. We develop an analytical framework that identifies the activities significant to the potential development of mathematical thinking and learning within one classroom. Evidence to support the framework is then offered from classroom video data and interview data. Three specific activities emerged from the dataset, and these were used as constructs within the framework to account for and examine the dialectic relation between a teacher’s activities and her students’ activities in producing the development of mathematical thinking. Grounding the development of the framework is the idea that students’ mathematical development is influenced by their interactions with others and practices within the classroom environment.
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Walshaw, M. (2016). Lev Vygotsky. In: Alternative Theoretical Frameworks for Mathematics Education Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33961-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33961-0_2
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