Classroom interaction has a significant influence on teaching and learning. It is through interaction that we solve problems, build ideas, make connections and develop our understanding. Patterns in Mathematics Classroom Interaction describes, exemplifies and considers the implications of patterns and structures of mathematics classroom interaction. Drawing on a Conversation Analytic approach, the book examines how the structures of interactions between teachers and students influence, enable, and constrain the mathematics that students are experiencing and learning in school. In particular, it considers the handling of difficulties or errors and the consequences on both the mathematics students are learning, and the learning of this mathematics. The various roles of silence and the treatment of knowledge and understanding within everyday classroom interactions also reveal the nature of mathematics as it is taught in different classrooms. Examples of students explaining, reasoning and justifying as they interact are also drawn upon to examine how the structures of classroom interaction support students to develop these discursive practices. The approach taken in Patterns in Mathematics Classroom Interaction enables the identification of not only what structures exist and pervade classroom discourse, but also how these structures influence teaching and learning. It is the understanding of how these structures affect students' experiences in the classroom that permits the use and development of practices that can support students' learning. This reflexive relationship between these structures of interactions and student actions and learning is central to the issues explored in this book, alongside the implications these may have for teachers' practice, and students' learning.

Patterns in Mathematics Classroom Interaction describes, exemplifies and considers the implications of patterns and structures of mathematics classroom interaction.

Mathematics is generally considered as the only science where knowledge is uni form, universal, and free from contradictions. „Mathematics is a social product - a 'net of norms', as Wittgenstein writes. In contrast to other institutions - traffic rules, legal systems or table manners -, which are often internally contradictory and are hardly ever unrestrictedly accepted, mathematics is distinguished by coherence and consensus. Although mathematics is presumably the discipline, which is the most differentiated internally, the corpus of mathematical knowledge constitutes a coher ent whole. The consistency of mathematics cannot be proved, yet, so far, no contra dictions were found that would question the uniformity of mathematics" (Heintz, 2000, p. 11). The coherence of mathematical knowledge is closely related to the kind of pro fessional communication that research mathematicians hold about mathematical knowledge. In an extensive study, Bettina Heintz (Heintz 2000) proposed that the historical development of formal mathematical proof was, in fact, a means of estab lishing a communicable „code of conduct" which helped mathematicians make themselves understood in relation to the truth of mathematical statements in a co ordinated and unequivocal way.

"Kids love to move. But how do we harness all that kinetic energy effectively for math learning? In Math on the Move, Malke Rosenfeld shows how pairing math concepts and whole body movement creates opportunities for students to make sense of math in entirely new ways. Malke shares her experience creating dynamic learning environments by: exploring the use of the body as a thinking tool, highlighting mathematical ideas that are usefully explored with a moving body, providing a range of entry points for learning to facilitate a moving math classroom. ..."--Publisher description.

This book grew out of a five-year collaboration between groups of American and German mathematics educators. The central issue addressed accounting for the messiness and complexity of mathematics learning and teaching as it occurs in classroom situations. The individual chapters are based on the view that psychological and sociological perspectives each tell half of a good story. To unify these concepts requires a combined approach that takes individual students' mathematical activity seriously while simultaneously seeing their activity as necessarily socially situated. Throughout their collaboration, the chapter authors shared a single set of video recordings and transcripts made in an American elementary classroom where instruction was generally compatible with recent reform recommendations. As a consequence, the book is much more than a compendium of loosely related papers. The combined approach taken by the authors draws on interactionism and ethnomethodology. Thus, it constitutes an alternative to Vygotskian and Soviet activity theory approaches. The specific topics discussed in individual chapters include small group collaboration and learning, the teacher's practice and growth, and language, discourse, and argumentation in the mathematics classroom. This collaborative effort is valuable to educators and psychologists interested in situated cognition and the relation between sociocultural processes and individual psychological processes.

This volume is a forward–looking intersection of Sociological perspectives on mathematics classrooms and socio-political perspectives on mathematics education. The first perspective has generated a substantial body of knowledge in the mathematics education. Interactionist research has deepened our understanding of interaction processes, socio-mathematical norms and the negotiation of meaning, generating a ‘micro-sociology’ or a ‘micro-ethnography’ of the mathematics classroom. More recently, socio-political perspectives on mathematics education interrelate educational practices in mathematics with macro-social issues of social equity, class, and race and with the policies that regulate institutionalized mathematics education. This book documents, strings together and juxtaposes research that uses ethnographical classroom data to explain, on the one hand, how socio-political issues play out in the mathematics class. On the other hand, it illuminates how class, race etc. affect the micro-sociology of the mathematics classroom. The volume advances the knowledge in the field by providing an empirical grounding of socio-political research on mathematics education, and it extends the frame in which mathematical classroom cultures are conceived.