Enactment of mathematical agency : a narrative analysis of classroom interactions

Abstract

The qualitative study reported here was aimed at documenting and describing how agency is enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom. A case study design was adopted and focused on a grade 11 mathematics class with all the students being participants. These participants were purposefully selected as they formed the class which was allocated to me for dayto-day mathematics teaching. The research question which the study sought to address was: how is agency enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom? The classroom in which data was generated adopted a sociocultural perspective as a referent for its practice. Due to this perspective, agency was thus employed as conceptualised by Pickering (1995). Data was generated through interviews and participant observation. However, the interviews were not employed in their „tradition‟ view, but were mostly like focus-group interviews in nature. Data also emerged from classroom discussions, when students in their groups, worked through learning activities. These interactions together with the interviews were audio recorded. Meanwhile, observation data was recorded in a researcher journal in which entries were made after each lesson. Data was analysed following Polkinghorne‟s (1995) narrative analysis of eventful data. During the analysis the researcher listened to the audio records a number of times, and then transcribed all the audio into text. This was followed by reading through the textual data which led to a selection of excerpts used in data analysis. It was found that agency was enacted during student-material interactions, as students engaged in the „dance of agency‟ when deciding on learning a new approach or using an old one to respond to questions. Furthermore, agency was enacted during student-student interactions when students initiated either group or whole class discussion and they were able to sustain the discussions to completion without the teacher‟s intrusion. Finally, during teacher-student interactions, students accounted for their actions and shared their experience and decision making process.