Thesis (M. Ed. (Mathematics Education)) -- University of Limpopo, 2017 / The qualitative study reported here was aimed at documenting and describing how agency is enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom. A case study design was adopted and focused on a grade 11 mathematics class with all the students being participants. These participants were purposefully selected as they formed the class which was allocated to me for dayto-day mathematics teaching. The research question which the study sought to address was: how is agency enacted through students‟ interactions in a mathematics classroom? The classroom in which data was generated adopted a sociocultural perspective as a referent for its practice. Due to this perspective, agency was thus employed as conceptualised by Pickering (1995). Data was generated through interviews and participant observation. However, the interviews were not employed in their „tradition‟ view, but were mostly like focus-group interviews in nature. Data also emerged from classroom discussions, when students in their groups, worked through learning activities. These interactions together with the interviews were audio recorded. Meanwhile, observation data was recorded in a researcher journal in which entries were made after each lesson. Data was analysed following Polkinghorne‟s (1995) narrative analysis of eventful data. During the analysis the researcher listened to the audio records a number of times, and then transcribed all the audio into text. This was followed by reading through the textual data which led to a selection of excerpts used in data analysis. It was found that agency was enacted during student-material interactions, as students engaged in the „dance of agency‟ when deciding on learning a new approach or using an old one to respond to questions. Furthermore, agency was enacted during student-student interactions when students initiated either group or whole class discussion and they were able to sustain the discussions to completion without the teacher‟s intrusion. Finally, during teacher-student interactions, students accounted for their actions and shared their experience and decision making process.

There are few descriptions of what teachers do to facilitate discussions that support students’ development of mathematical agency. Likewise, little is known about how elementary students conceptualize their own agency. This study explored how teachers’ facilitation of mathematical discussions potentially fostered students’ mathematical agency. Additionally, this study investigated ways in which students conceptualized their own mathematical agency within these classrooms. This study was situated in an urban school with a linguistically, academically, and ethnically diverse student population. The sample consisted of two upper elementary school teachers and their pupils (n = 40). Data, collected during the 2018–19 school year, included 12 observations of mathematics lessons, 4 interviews with the teacher participants, and teacher questionnaires. Student data were collected using the Student Agency Questionnaire (SAQ) and group interviews. Mathematics lessons were videotaped, transcribed, and coded to discern ways in which teacher participants facilitated mathematical discussions. Two case studies focused on participants' classroom discussion practices were created. Themes that emerged from the case studies were that teacher participants fostered students’ mathematical agency through their facilitation of discussions by 1) creating a positive learning community; 2) supporting students’ willingness to publicly engage in mathematical discussions; and 3) sharing the power of teaching and learning. Analysis of the Student Agency Questionnaire (SAQ) data indicated that students in both teacher participant classrooms reported behaviors associated with mathematical agency. Observations and group interview data supported the SAQ results that students in both classrooms displayed mathematical agency. Student group interview data analysis showed that students who considered themselves doers of mathematics exhibited the following characteristics: habits of perseverance, a confident attitude about doing mathematics, and a willingness to actively engage with mathematics. This study provides evidence that teachers’ facilitation moves have the power to maintain and extend students’ mathematical agency. This study will contribute to the little empirical research available on supporting students’ mathematical agency in elementary classrooms. Further research should continue to investigate in a larger array of classrooms at varying levels (elementary, middle and high school).

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