Negotiating What Counts as Competent Participation Through Student Presentations

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Discourse and Social Interactions in Mathematics Lessons

Abstract

Student presentations offer important opportunities for teachers to make public and build on students’ emerging mathematical ideas (Stein et al. 2008), and to help students recognize the valuable contributions of low-status peers (Cohen & Lotan 1995; 1999). To understand how meanings of competent participation are negotiated in student presentations, we use tools developed by Gresalfi and colleagues (2009) to attend to how agency and accountability are distributed in the classroom. We examine three cases of lesson enactments, highlighting contrasts between opportunities for conceptual agency and disciplinary agency (from Gresalfi et al. 2009) and a third type of agency which we term expository agency. One case reinforced status differences between students while the other two supported an inclusive definition of competent participation.

Authors

• Kimberly Seashore, University of California - Berkeley

• Alyssa Sayavedra, University of California - Berkeley

• Lawrence Teng, University of California - Berkeley

• Sarah R. Firestone, University of California - Berkeley