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Teacher questioning in communities of political practice

The central aim of this paper is to contribute to a theoretical understanding of the nature of classrooms as communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Theories of participation in situated practices have been a rich way to understand the ways in which cognition and learning are social. Theories of participation give ontological and epistemological priority to action: they focus on what people do, but people are more than what they do. If we want to understand why we do what we do and how we experience our actions and those of others as meaningful, then other theoretical frameworks need to be drawn upon and theories of social practice need to be complemented by other perspectives. An important theoretical tool, both in my interpretation of interview material and in the theoretical framework of this paper, is the concept of “life world” (Ashworth, 1997). Considering each student’s life world means more than thinking about their individual experiences of the social practices of the classroom. Rather, it asserts the personal truth of each participant’s situation. Thinking about students’ perspectives on classroom interactions as giving insight into their life worlds is worthwhile for a number of reasons. Methodologically, it means listening to the students as credible informants. Theoretically, it allows us to make sense of the complexity of the classroom, the way in which there is one class but many worlds (Roth et al., 1999). Politically, accepting the validity of individuals’ life worlds is congruent with a commitment to “deep democracy” (Mindell, 1995). However, I am not attempting a theoretical synthesis of theories of social practice and the concept of the life world; they have very different philosophical foundations that do not easily speak to each other. Rather, I am using both as maps that can help us to understand the same landscapes: one helps to map the way in which meaning is communal and shared, the other the way in which it is individual and diverse. My focus here is on teacher questioning of students. Teacher questioning is a frequent, universal, and pervasive practice in school classrooms (Roth, 1996). The way teachers and students interact through questions both typifies and is productive of the fuller range of classroom practices and so offers insights into the nature of these social practices. In addition, the way in which students experience different forms of teacher questioning has not often been reported. The unreflective use of questions and some of the forms the practice can take has been criticized both on grounds of its effect on learning (Dillon, 1985; Dillon, 1988) and on children’s affective experience of mathematics (Anderson, 2000; Anderson & Boylan, 2000). One of my assertions in this paper is that mathematics classrooms are communities of political practice. My concern here is not with the “big” politics of mathematics education. This “big” politics is concerned with what aims and values are being promoted