Understanding the choice and use of examples in mathematics teacher education multilingual classrooms

The teaching of mathematics is mostly done with tasks that learners and teachers do or solve, in and outside of class. These tasks, which are used to illustrate concepts in mathematics, are referred to in this paper as examples in mathematics. Examples that teachers choose and use are fundamental to what mathematics is taught and learned, and what opportunities for learning are created in mathematics classrooms. In this paper, I bring together two frameworks which have been used separately in mathematics education research, namely variation theory, and meaning making as a dialogic process framework, in order to understand exemplifying practices in teacher education multilingual classrooms. Lesson transcript data from an introductory class on probability in one teacher education multilingual classroom are used to illustrate how these two theories can be used to examine the choice and use of examples in mathematics teacher education multilingual classrooms. This analysis shows the dialectic relationships among the mathematical object of learning, teacher moves, and the interactional process in which the mathematics content was imbedded.