Enactment of mathematical agency in ‘the mangle’

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that during collaborative classroom interactions, ‘the mangle’ is entangled in different forms of agency that (dis)enable mathematical agency. We first unpack student’s agency in the context of collaborative classroom interactions, and then use excerpts of interactions to illustrate how ‘the mangle’ is entangled in resistant agency and relational agency. The excerpts were sourced from a Grade 11 mathematics classroom, facilitated by the first author, as students worked through an activity on factorization of quadratic expressions. We organize our analysis of the critical incidents of only student-student interactions using Mueller et al.’s (2012) framework to re-story how ‘the mangle’ is entangled.