Didactics of Mathematics in Geneva (DiMaGe)

The research group on Didactics of Mathematics in Geneva (DiMaGe) is led by Prof. Jean-Luc Dorier.

Research Fields

Didactics of mathematics studies situations in which someone in a position of a teacher, intentionally seek to modify the relation to a piece of knowledge of another subject, in a position of a student. One calls “didactical situations”, such situations in which the goal common to the teacher and the students is a piece of knowledge.

Studying didactical situations requires suppressing the opacity of the process of that led from the academic knowledge to the knowledge to be taught to the knowledge actually taught (“didactical transposition”). It also requires to clarify the teaching and learning processes about this knowledge, in particular by analyzing interactions - related to the knowledge at stake - between the teacher and the students, in the specific conditions of their cooperation within the teaching system.

Researchers in didactics of mathematics claim their specificity with regard to other disciplines: “In order to produce, improve, reproduce, describe and understand mathematics teaching situations, it has became necessary -and possible- to model this teaching activity into specific theoretical frameworks and not only consider it as conjunction of facts that could be studied in different autonomous theoretical frameworks form pedagogy, sociology, psychology, mathematics, linguistics or epistemology.