Discursive Authority and Sociocultural Positioning in the Mathematics Classroom: New Directions for Teacher Professional Development

This article discusses findings from a two-day teacher conference focusing on discursive authority and sociocultural positioning in mathematics classrooms. The conference was designed to study how research on classroom discourse could be transformed into effective professional development activities. We describe how the focus on discourse, positioning, and authority was operationalized and made pragmatic for the teachers by focusing very closely on specific language use in classrooms. For each of the six workshops of the conference, we outline the goal of the workshop, the activities that were structured to reach those goals, and the theoretical constructs that were introduced to the teacher participants. We then draw on (a) transcripts of video and audio recordings, (b) material produced by the teachers, and (c) survey data, to discuss how these theoretical constructs were taken up and leveraged by participants as a means of reflecting on their own and other’s practice.