It’s like you’re a teacherǃ a social semiotic analysis of authority relations among high school mathematics students

Abstract

This chapter draws from social semiotics to explore how recent trends in mathematics pedagogy affect classroom interaction. We perform a genre analysis on several excerpts of classroom interaction, drawn from classrooms in transition, from a more teacher-centered approach, toward approaches that invest students with authority to construct mathematics for themselves. We use these excerpts to show the challenge of shifting from a familiar genre to the more experimental student-centered pedagogies.