Learning, Culture, and Social Interaction.
ABSTRACT: Reflecting across empirical results from three mathematics-education design-based research studies of collaborative problem-solving with material resources, we investigate social-interaction mechanisms by which action and discourse mobilize insight and conceptual change. We focus on moments when participants’ multimodal utterances pertaining to features of the shared environment, or physical operations thereupon, gave pause to their peers, who apparently had been perceiving these features differently. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy of perception and cognitive–anthropological theories of joint action, we look to characterize why the materials’ structural forms and quantitative–relational qualities became contested, how these emergent disagreements were negotiated, and what learning, if any, apparently resulted from reconciling perspectives. We present micro-genetic analyses of three vignettes, one from each project, to offer our accounts of the social dynamics that engendered conflict and resolution. Our findings suggest that whereas divergent idiosyncratic perceptions may abound across students, these ambiguities surface and catalyze productive argumentation, yet only when they translate into conflicting micro-operations, such as overt physical intervention that changes an object’s location, orientation, or composition contrary to a peer’s tacit intention. We comment on the socio-discursive affordances of different construction media and semiotic registers—embodied, material, inscriptional—as disclosing implicit heteroperception.