ABSTRACT
Discourses are ways of thinking, believing, valuing, acting, interacting, dressing, gesturing, and using objects, tools, technologies, places, spaces, and times to enact or pull off a socially recognizable identity or avatar. They begin and end in history, change and transform as they live, and their interactions with each other across time and space constitute history and society. In Lampert's math game, talk is an affordance for collaboratively co-designing solutions to math problems and reflecting on mathematical thinking and reasoning in one's self and in others. The effective abilities required are social, interactive, and meta-cognitive. The class is being taught by Maggie Lampert, a professor of mathematics education at the University of Michigan, but also a fifth-grade math teacher. They are built in conversations which are reflective and responsive and turn taking, the sorts of conversations we have argued that are fundamental to discourse analysis, to games, to science, and to life.
