My research, within the collective in which I work, is conducted with young elementary school students. One might think that "scholarly mathematics" is far removed from elementary school mathematics. But this is precisely the idea we are trying to get away from.

An essential goal of our collective is therefore to design teaching sequences that allow students and teachers to conduct a mathematical inquiry, through the use and deep understanding of representations and symbolic forms. In particular, we have set up a device, in elementary school, from the first year. This is the "Journal of Number", in which students are invited to write down the mathematics they know, based on what they have recently learned in class.

In this talk, I propose to show how such a device can contribute to establishing an epistemic kinship between elementary school mathematics and the mathematics of mathematicians, in particular by having teachers and researchers work together on the production of instructional sequences based on the Journal of Number.

Bio

Gérard Sensevy is a professor emeritus of Educational Sciences at the University of Western Brittany in France. The main axis of his research is the study, in Didactics, of teaching and learning, and of their relations. His latest work has led him, within a collective, to the elaboration of a theory of joint action in Didactics (JATD), in which he seeks to link instructional science to other disciplines of humanities and social sciences. One of the major elements of the research program of this collective consists in the development of Cooperative Engineering, in which professionals and researchers cooperate together to jointly design and implement educational devices.