Interacción entre discursos en una situación de práctica matemática escolar

The notion of educational practice is explored from the perspective of the teacher's discourse and the students' discourses when interacting with each other in the mathematics classroom. Sociocultural theories of human talk (Elbers, 2003; Seedhouse, 2004) serve as framework for analysing part of a classroom session with a group of 15 and 16 year-old students in Barcelona, Spain. Changes in public discourses are identified by detecting changes in communication patterns. Our data show that students react in different ways to the teacher's same public discourse, i.e., demands or effective implementation of change are not assumed the same way. According to our theoretical positioning, these differences are not so much related to the characteristics of each specific student, but to differences in the classroom social context and in the expectations that the group as a whole has on each of its members.