THE PRODUCTION OF LEGITIMATE TEXT AND THE STRATIFICATION OF ACHIEVEMENT IN MATHEMATICS CLASSROOMS

In school, the stratification of achievement is based on the students ’ differential production of what counts as a legitimate text in mathematics classrooms. The symposium will be concerned with a language of description that accounts for the construction, maintenance or mitigation of unequal attainment on the micro-level of classroom practice. The discussion is intended to focus on the interface between the theoretical and the empirical, that is, on an external language of description (an “observation language”), which may help to organise accounts of classroom practice. RATIONALE Teachers and students in mathematics classrooms quickly come to know which students perform well in mathematics and which do not. This occurs even in classrooms where selection processes are intended to produce homogeneous classes and in contexts where the students are together for the first time. We regard the disparity in students ’ achievement as a social construction in the context of the social practices of the mathematics classroom and as unrelated t