ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we show how students’ collaboration regarding their work in class can sometimes facilitate a sociable ‘community-infl uenced’ classroom mathematics talk. The social affordances of collaboration, and indeed mathematics as a human, social activity, have been examined by many others, although sometimes under the guise of equitable mathematics or inclusive mathematics pedagogy (e.g., Boaler, 2000a; Boaler & Greeno, 2000; Nasir & Cobb, 2002) and earlier in the area of ‘cooperative’ classrooms. Such research has consistently pointed to the value of encouraging studentstudent interaction as a means to foster more positive identifi cations with mathematics, often for those who might be described as struggling learners (e.g., Boaler, 2000a).
