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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ul/oai:ulspace.ul.ac.za:10386/3806 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Mokwana, Lekwa Lazarus |
| Contributors | Chuene, K. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ix, 87 leaves |
| Relation |
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