'I am more of a visual learner': The disciplinary values and identities in school mathematics learning and group work

摘要

This article depicts the disciplinary values and identities that students (re)construct in the realm of school mathematics. Video-based interactional analysis and video-mediated interviews were conducted in the context of group work in a school with a high percentage of immigrant students whose first language is not English. By adopting the framework of figured worlds, we identified figured disciplinary values where the visualization approach tended to be devalued compared to the calculational approach. The group that was not overly constrained by this figured disciplinary value attended more to the contributions made non-verbally and non-symbolically. Some immigrant students in this study identified themselves with the figurative identity as a "visual learner" that constrained their participation in group problem solving and influenced their overall relationship with the discipline of mathematics. The findings underline the importance of attending to the opaque values students project onto ways of engaging in mathematics.