The aim of this thesis is to investigate and analyze practices in multilingual mathematics classrooms in compulsory school in Sweden. By using ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation, data were collected in a number of multilingual mathematics classrooms in suburban areas of a major city. The data include field notes, interviews and informal conversations with students, teachers and school administrators. The analysis is based on a coordination of Foucault’s discourse theory and Skovsmose’s critical mathematics education. The socio-political viewpoint defines power as relational and as having an effect on school mathematics practices. Discourse, agency, foreground and identity are used as analytic tools. In five articles, the thesis investigates how the various discourses affect multilingual students’ agency, foreground and identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. The effects of students’ and teachers’ agency on discourse switching in multilingual mathematics classrooms are also investigated. The findings indicate that bilingual communication in the mathematics classroom enhances students’ identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. Language- and content-based instruction seems to do the same, though monolingual instruction may jeopardize students’ identities as bilinguals while the discourse may normalize Swedish and Swedishness exclusively. Focus on linguistic dimensions in mathematics build up a communicative reform-oriented school mathematics discourse. The competing and intersecting discourses available in the multilingual mathematics classroom affect students’ agency, foreground and identity formation as engaged mathematics learners. For example, a reform-oriented school mathematics discourse intersecting with a social-relational discourse affects students’ active agency allowing power relations to be negotiated. A principal conclusion is that the success or failure of multilingual students in multilingual mathematics classrooms cannot be explained in terms of language and cultural factors alone, but only in relation discourse, and to social and political conditions in society at large. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Accepted. Paper 4: Manuscript. Paper 5: Manuscript.

This study takes a particular look at mathematics teacher education communities of practice (CoPs) in order to provide rich descriptions of the CoPs and make claims about its relation/in relation to teacher preparation and particularly the preparation of preservice teachers for teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms. The three dimensions of communities of practice proposed by Wenger (mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise) were used in conjunction with Mortimer and Scott’s notion of meaning making as a dialogic process as a theoretical lens to gain an entry into the nature of communities of practice in pre-service mathematics teacher education classrooms. Data was collected through pre-observation interviews of 12 teacher educators at four Universities in one Province in South Africa in Phase One of the study. A methodological approach based on Wenger’s CoP theory and Mortimer and Scott’s dialogic process was developed and used to analyse classroom observation videos of four of these teacher educators’ classroom communities of practice in two universities in Phase Two of the study. Using the privileged practices in the CoPs as points of departure and how these practices shaped and were shaped by other dynamics in the CoPs, the findings emerging from the study indicate that within the multiply layers of teacher education, there is an overarching emphasis given to the acquisition of mathematical content. Nevertheless, the communicative approaches and patterns of discourse used by the different teacher educators opened up different possibilities as far as preparing preservice teachers for teaching (in multilingual classrooms) is concerned. Wenger’s community of practice theory has found applications in different spheres of life and in different organisational and educational settings. Its use to understand and describe mathematics pre-service classrooms is, however, still largely unexplored. A theoretical contribution that this study makes lies in the extension of Wenger’s CoP theory to include dialogic processes. A methodological contribution lies in the development of an organisational language (based on Wenger’s three dimensions of CoP) to characterise pre-service teacher education classrooms.