Being told or finding out or not: a sociological analysis of pedagogic tasks

Pedagogic tasks can be considered as a resource for engaging an audience and manipulating their apprenticeship. However, different strategies can be deployed according to the pedagogic aim and what constitutes competence in the practice being pedagogised. The position taken here is that message acquirers will assume a degree of authority in the practice and the degree to which that is achieved is dependent on the possibilities made available in the task(s) set. A sociological analysis recognises that the engagement between author and audience in a pedagogic relation will lead to a distribution of message across positioned acquirer voices; the argument presented here seeks to map those possibilities in an explicit way. School mathematics is taken as an exampl