The multimodality of lesson guides and the communication of social relations

Curriculum resources such as textbooks and lesson guides communicate messages about the social relations between the teacher, students, artefacts, and the mathematics. Because of their implicit nature, these messages can be hard to surface and perhaps therefore are not frequently covered in curriculum resource analysis. Tackling this shortcoming, we examine mathematics lesson guides or the daily lesson descriptions written for elementary teachers. Drawing on multimodality and activity theory, we characterize the social relations messaged in the lesson guides in terms of two constructs: authority and distance. We present and illustrate an analytical approach to uncovering these messages in lesson guides from Sweden, USA, and Flanders. Our analytical approach enabled us to distinguish configurations of social relations that vary primarily across the three educational contexts, which strengthens our argument for viewing the configuration of social relations as a cultural script.