My research interests cover both theoretical and practical aspects of mathematics thinking, teaching, and learning. The vertebral axis of my research is a sustained involvement in classroom work with teachers and students. As a sociocultural theorist, I am interested in moving beyond bourgeois student-centred pedagogical discourses. Drawing on Lev Vygotsky’s historical-cultural school of thought and Evald Ilyenkov’s epistemology my current work focuses on the elaboration of an approach in which the problem of teaching and learning is formulated around the concept of alterity of Emmanuel Lévinas and Mikhail Bakhtin. In such an approach, learning is conceptualized as a social, political, and transformative process through which the students critically encounter other (historical and contemporary) voices and perspectives. Arising in the course of sensuous mediated cultural praxes, learning, I argue, is not just about knowing but also about becoming (becoming-someone-with-others). The formulation of learning as a cultural and historical process where knowing and being are mutually constitutive leads to a non-utilitarian and a non-instrumentalist conception of the classroom and education. Entrenched in unerasable ethical concerns, the classroom appears as a space for the growth of intersubjectivity and the nurturing of what I call the communal self.
lradford@laurentian.ca
