Teachers understanding students: a study on teachers’ intersubjective understanding in mathematics classrooms

Abstract This paper presents a qualitative study on a specific type of the social phenomenon of intersubjective understanding, namely teachers’ intersubjective understanding of students in mathematics classrooms. This type of intersubjective understanding shows close connections to other phenomena that are of great interest to mathematics education research already, particularly to the phenomenon of teacher noticing. Within the study presented here, the intersubjective understanding of two mathematics teachers in nine classroom situations was reconstructed. This empirical investigation proceeded in two steps: first, the two teachers’ ‘mathematics-related life stories’ were reconstructed before, in a second step, reconstructions of their intersubjective understanding of students’ experiences in mathematics classroom situations were conducted. Results of this procedure were then theoretically generalised and led to a reconstruction of several general characteristics that mathematics teachers’ intersubjective understanding of their students may have. Two of these characteristics — the temporal proximity to assessment situations and the ‘polypersonality’ of alter ego — will be discussed in this paper.