Accounting for situated experience in socio-cultural-historical inquiry : Bakhtinian utterance in a mathematics classroom

This paper discusses two cases of instruction from within a mathematics classroom, in which the situated experience of participants is informed using Bakhtinian utterance as analytical construct. The first illustrates situatedness and shared reference between teachers and students in the social speech of the classroom, with reference to the generic ‘When we multiply, we add’ in the teaching-learning of exponents. The second discusses the sharing of experience and the shaping of reason by students solving a problem as a group, in relation to a graph depicting the movement of an elevator between two floors where the word ‘stop’ is used to both convince and be convinced by the other. Located within a socio-cultural-historical study and accounting for the materiality of language in which individual intention, meaning and experience is populated, a Bakhtinian analysis enables access to both individual and collective thinking. This approach in turn informs the nature of active knowing in the teaching-learning of mathematics and its authoritative word