Chapter 7: Regulating Mathematics Classroom Discourse: Text, Context, and Intertextuality

Mathematics teachers perform through discursive patterns of instruction and curriculum, while also positioning (often unconsciously) themselves and their students in relation to various cultural constructs and contexts. Teacher discourse in the classroom often contains comments about mathematics as discipline and mathematics as text, and such comments frame and contextualize the activity within the classroom, and reveal teacher assumptions regarding the ontological and epistemological status of mathematics texts. I use the word text to refer to all forms of semiotic and linguistic interaction, but, in this chapter, focus primarily on written and spoken texts. Teacher references to the relationship between these texts and “real” mathematics or the “real” world function as framing devices in classroom interaction, whereby a “context” for classroom activity is construed. Not only do such discursive habits constitute an arguably false binary between the mathematics beyond the surface of the text and the text itself, but they also position students and teachers in power relations structured and sustained by the leveraging of this binary. As a discursive formation within classroom discourse, such metastatements about mathematics texts regulate and govern student and teacher engagement with the very texts that are, as Veel (1999) suggests, the source of “differentiated access to meaning potential” (p. 206). Thus, the discursive construal of the relationship between text and context plays a pivotal role in regulating student access to meaningful mathematics.

This complex discursive performance points to the multiple ways in which teachers frame the ontological status of texts, while simultaneously positioning themselves and students in power relations with respect to “mathematical knowledge.” Positioning is not simply the act of situating someone within particular discursive practices; positioning is an inevitable and dual process whereby subjects are subjected to dominant normative discourse, while also constituted and enabled through such compliance (Butler, 1997). Our discursive habits involve a contradictory mix of submission to the cultural norms inscribed in the discourse, and empowerment through this act of re-inscription. Pedagogy always involves this contradictory mix of submission and empowerment, since teacher and student voice and authority are constituted by the very discourse that confines and disciplines their actions. Teacher and student agency thus emerges through this contradictory mix; they are hailed as subjects within an institutional discourse. In mathematics classrooms, in particular, teacher agency is uniquely constructed in relation to highly esoteric texts, and teacher authority is frequently enacted in terms of decoding and contextualizing these texts, be it within the discipline itself, the “real” world, or prior habits of textual production.

In this chapter, I try to trouble the taken-for-granted distinction between text and context by examining classroom transcripts for evidence of how mathematics texts are discursively framed by teachers. My aim is to show how contexts are realized in discourse, and that we therefore have no unmediated access to them. Thus, I advocate for a poststructural approach to the notion of “context” as a “hypertextual pastiche” (Lather, 2007, p. 110), an approach that lays the groundwork for reading subjectivity through discursive patterns of interaction. In arguing for a textual reading of context, and in attempting to disrupt the often unexamined binary between text and context, I hope to make room for a decoding strategy that reveals the positioning of subjectivity through particular grammatical features of classroom discourse. I use the concept of intertextuality (Lemke 2002; Tannen, 2007) as a means of theorizing the fusion of text and context in classroom interaction, and argue that patterns of citation, repetition and reference to ‘other’ texts create a textual layering which functions to produce and position subjects within classroom discourse.