3Creating Learning Spaces The Annual Clements/Foyster Lecture

This paper addresses the conference theme of Identities, cultures and learning spaces by exploring how learning spaces might be theorised, how they are created, and how teachers and students negotiate their identities within these spaces. Examples of mathematics classroom practice and teacher learning and development are analysed using concepts derived from sociocultural theories of learning to consider what it might mean to speak of “technology enriched learning spaces”. The analysis adapts Valsiner’s zone theory to study interactions between teachers, students, technology, and the teaching-learning environment. The conference theme of Identities, cultures and learning spaces reflects growing interest within the mathematics education research community in social and cultural aspects of learning. This “social turn ” in the human sciences (Lerman, 2000; Sfard & Prusak, 2005) is marked by the emergence of theories that view learning as a form of participation in social and cultural practices rather than as an internal mental process. Over several years my colleagues and I have carried out a series of studies informed by sociocultural theories of learning to investigate the teacher’s role in creating a classroom culture of mathematical inquiry (Goos, 2004), the dynamics of student discussion in smal