The emergent perspective in rich learning environments: Some roles of tools and activities in the construction of sociomathematical norms

The emergent perspective (Yackel and Cobb, 1996) is a powerful theory for describing cognitive development within classrooms. Yackel and Cobb have shown that the formation of social and sociomathematical norms, and opportunities for learning are intertwined. The present study is an attempt to extend the range of application of the emergent perspective to middle high school classrooms. The learning environments we consider are rich in the sense that (i) the tasks in which students are engaged are open-ended problem-situations (ii) the activities around the tasks are multiphased, consisting of small group collaboration on problem solving, reporting and reflection in a classroom forum with the teacher (iii) the tools used are multi-representational software. We identify here some practices rooted in such rich environments from which several sociomathematical norms stemmed. The present study shows that socio-mathematical norms do not rise from verbal interactions only, but also from computer manipulations as communicative non-verbal actions.