Caractérisation du discours mathématique pour l’enseignement associé au raisonnement mathématique d’enseignantes du primaire au Québec: une exploration

Mathematical reasoning has an important place in many primary and secondary curricula around the world. In the particular case of Quebec, it is a competency that has had a prescribed assessment framework for nearly 20 years. However, little is known about teachers’ understanding of mathematical reasoning or the practices they use to foster its development in the classroom—both in Quebec and elsewhere. In this article, we analyze the discourse of teachers in order to examine how they conceptualize mathematical reasoning and what practices they believe are critical for its development. The Mathematical Discourse for Teaching framework (Cooper 2015) helps to characterize these practices. Results from our study pinpoint key words, shared and hoped-for routines, narratives that are generally endorsed by the community as well as commognitive conflicts. Specifically, mathematical reasoning is associated either with a competency to be assessed or, more broadly, with a process of understanding. These two manners of conceptualizing mathematical reasoning lead to different routines, but also to a tension between the desire to help students make sense of mathematics and the requirement to test competency based on a specific rubric. These findings appear to be linked to the fact that the Mathematical Discourse for Teaching (MDT) of primary teachers is based on multiple discourses that do not necessarily share the same founding principles or metadiscursive rules, which leads to inherent commognitive conflicts for teachers in this community.