Role and place of the teacher in the mathematics class
2007-2013
This research topic combined three doctoral theses supervised by Dr. Jean Luc Dorier within the DiMaGe team, that of Céline Maréchal (The effect of institutional constraints on teacher practices in specialised teaching. A didactical analysis based on the case of introduction to sums, defended on September 3rd 2010), Stéphane Clivaz (Mathematics to teach – Analysis of mathematical knowledge of vaudois teachers and the description of the influence of this knowledge on the mathematics education in primary school, defended on September 15th, 2011) and Audrey Daina (Utilisation of resources: from the preparation of a sequence to its realisation in a mathematics class. Five case studies on the notion of area in Geneva primary school teachers,’ soutenue June 28th 2013).
If the didactics of mathematics finds its origins in the analysis of teaching situations and students’ work, the development of didactic engineery work has rapidly taken up problems of diffusion, updating the essential role of the teacher in their realisation. Additionally, ‘naturalist’ observations (meaning the common conditions of activities chosen by the teacher, not academics engineering) of classes have led to many approaches in the analysis of teacher practices in mathematics classes. These works have revealed themselves to be even more important when it comes to building the engineery of teacher training and to draw out content that is based on professional knowledge. Moreover, the taking into account of institutional constraints in certain theories has allowed for a widening of the scope of research.
Given the diversity of existing works, in didactics of mathematics and in similar fields, in France and abroad, on these questions, our team has aimed, through three distinct case studies to use the diverse theories and approaches trying to draw out the driving themes and complementarities.