How to take into account the dynamics of mathematical activity?
Pedagogical and didactic constraints in teaching inquiry-based activities
During this last decade, many investigations carried out in the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic have been focused on the design, experimentation and analysis of inquiry-based activities based on study and research paths. This research requires considering—and locally implementing—a new didactic paradigm, where educational goals are conceived in terms of open issues to be studied instead of pre-established contents to be learned.
The change of paradigm encounters important limitations that researchers may take as clues to analyse the current functioning of the older didactic paradigm. One of them is related to the lack of tools to explicitly describe mathematical knowledge as a dynamic arborescence of questions and answers, rather than as a well-structured body of notions and properties. We will show how this absence becomes a crucial constraint for teachers to design and lead inquiry processes. The way to provide these tools remains an open research question which needs to be addressed.
Prof. Marianna Bosch (U Ramon Llull, Barcelona) is a VELUX visiting professor at IND from June 15 to Sept. 15, 2014.
Place: Teaching room, IND, Øster Voldgade 3.