Teacher practice in primary mathematics classrooms: A story of positioning

The past twenty-five years have seen a dramatic increase in the interest given to dialogue between teachers and students, and students and students during mathematics teaching and learning. This interest is evident within the growing body of research and the call for the increased quality and quantity of student discourse in curriculum and policy documents. Recent research in mathematics education is underpinned by the belief that students learn best when they have the opportunity to participate in their own and others’ mathematical talk, text, and actions in purposeful and meaningful ways. This study explores how teachers position themselves and students in their lowest and highest mathematics strategy groups and how that positioning influences the sharing of mathematical know-how. Mathematical know-how within this study comprises teacher and student independence, judgement, and creativity. Social-constructivist theories of teaching and learning underpin the focus of this study. The importance of teachers and students constructing and co-constructing individual and shared mathematical understandings through dialogically rich interactions with each other and the environment are considered. Positioning theory provides the theoretical lens through which mathematical know-how will be analysed and understood. The constructs of positioning theory important to this research were the teachers’ and students’ positions, enacted as their rights and duties, the storylines that develop through the positions, rights, and duties and the teachers’ and students’ social acts which come to have significance and be a social force within the teaching and learning. The decision to employ qualitative case study methodology arose naturally from the subjective social phenomenon of teaching and learning. The analysis of data generated through video and audio recordings, transcriptions, participant observations, and documents and archival records supported the development of the two cases: t