Chapter 1: Challenging Perspectives on Mathematics Classroom Communication: From Representations to Contexts, Interactions, and Politics

We have chosen to put together this book for two reasons. First, we acknowledge that an increased focus on communication has influenced and shaped work in a range of perspectives and areas in mathematics education research and practice. Over the past decade and a half, we have witnessed more and more studies that—although not directly concerned with analyses of communication—are considering communication as an integral part of pedagogy and didactics in mathematics classrooms, mathematics education curricula, and broader educational structures. The notion of communication opens up to embrace not only what is happening and what is being said by the participants in a classroom setting, but also conveys the underlying values, ideologies and politics that influence the practice, and thereby the formation of identities, the ways in which participants make sense of their experiences, what counts as valid activity, and the extent to which the participants can claim to belong to specific communities of practice. Second, we would like to initiate a dialogue concerning these areas of study, and to reflect on how they describe, define and conceive of communication. Despite recent developments, studies of mathematics classroom communication still largely assume particular perspectives on learning, on persons, on mathematics, and on research. Our main focus, as the title of the book implies, is to challenge predominant perspectives and to highlight through the chapters, and through reflection and discussion over the chapters, what continue to be unanswered questions, the silenced issues, and the research challenges.