“It’s like they’re speaking a different language!” Investigating an accidental resistance to school mathematics reform

In this seminar Professor Davis will examine multiple distinct-but-internally-coherent modes of talking about school mathematics in North America, focusing in particular on the vocabularies associated with “Standardized/Traditional Education” and “Authentic/Reform Education.” He uses this analysis to interrogate a surprisingly popular “interlanguage” that seems to echo sensibilities from both Standardized and Authentic Education, but that lacks the coherence of either. Noting how modes of talking are associated with modes of teaching, he points to some of the troublesome implications for mathematics teaching as he draws an analogy between reforming one’s teaching practice and learning a second language.