Chapter 8: Practices of Remembering: Organizing Math Activities in a First Grade Classroom

In educational settings, the notions of remembering and learning are often interlinked. Students are continuously required to show and prove that they have learned something. Such procedures rest on the idea that the learner should individually be able to remember for example procedures or correct answers. This means that the “outcome” of learning can be observed, described, and evaluated in terms of preservation and loss (Säljö & Pramling, 2011). In this chapter, a different perspective is adopted in which remembering is conceptualized as a social accomplishment and analyzed as a practical concern for participants in situated activities. We will analyze practices of remembering in a math lesson in a Swedish first-grade classroom. Focus will be on the social use of memory in pedagogical discourses: on the social, communicative, and material resources that students and their teacher draw upon when doing remembering in classroom activities (cf. Goodwin, 1987, 2000; Middleton & Brown, 2005). Drawing on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspectives (e.g., Goodwin, 2000; Schegloff, 1996), our interest is in processes of remembering. We will investigate how remembering is oriented to and accomplished in classroom interaction, with the aim to describe and analyze the social and material organization of remembering in math activities. As we will demonstrate, practices of math in this school involve social interaction among students and teachers; they involve interaction with different artifacts such as computers and games, and interaction of the present with the past and the future (cf. Goodwin, 2013; Hutchins, 2006; Middleton, 2002). Thus, a learning environment such as this classroom constitutes a perspicuous site for the exploration of how practices of remembering are accomplished in situ.