FACILITATING ENCOUNTERS AMONG TEACHERS WITH REPRESENTATIONS OF TEACHING: TWO REGISTERS

Abstract

We report on the management of teacher study groups designed to elicit the practical rationality of mathematics teaching. These study groups appeal to practitioners as occasions for professional development yet are deliberately designed as research instruments, as catalysts of the often-implicit norms and dispositions that sustain mathematics teaching in secondary school. The dual purpose of these groups makes them amenable to tensions comparable to those that are endemic to teaching itself. Those tensions were handled by having two facilitators invested of different personas and agendas—a moderator and a researcher. Excerpts from these sessions are used to argue that these dual-facilitator sessions create a context for a conversation that can be described as interweaving two different registers.