ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates secondary mathematics teachers’ interactions with authors of curriculum materials as the materials are being developed. We focus our attention on the ways in which the intended curriculum1 is negotiated by highlighting how teachers participate in the curriculum development process – beginning with the authors’ initial conceptions of teaching and learning sequences (i.e., their “intentions”) as reflected in early drafts of written materials, and following the evolution of the curriculum materials into a final, published and viable commercial product. The term negotiation can connote both a hard (i.e., to settle a contract) and soft (i.e., to confer with another in order to come to agreement) definition, depending on the context in which it is used (Costello & Pritchard, 1994). We use the softer definition as a descriptor throughout this chapter. We identified three types of negotiation and conversation that produced changes as the curriculum materials evolved: (a) author point of view negotiation, in which authors of the curriculum materials negotiate changes with teachers in order to help teachers see and test new ideas that challenge their existing ideas about teaching and learning and the mathematical content; (b) teacher point of view negotiation, in which teachers negotiate changes with authors of the curriculum materials to help make materials more teachable and relevant to local situations; and (c) discussions of how to develop and teach the curriculum materials to help users better understand the core principles behind the curriculum project.2 Although all negotiations described in this chapter included some aspects of each of these three types, typically one or another was more apparent in a particular negotiation context or setting.
