CESAME: The Personal History of Learning Mathematics in the Classroom: An Analysis of Some Students Narratives
Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, (1999)Abstract
Our paper comes from the work we did in the Association pour le développement du Génie Cognitif, Nice (GECO) and more precisely in a project named CESAME supported by the Institut Universitaire pour la Formation des Maîtres (IUFM) of Nice. CESAME means: « Construction Expérientielle du Savoir, et Autrui dans les Mathématiques Enseignées » and our aim is to interpret what students say or write about their experience of mathematics and more precisely about their experience of the Necessity in mathematics (see the paper by Drouhard presented in the group of CERME). In this paper we shall present the part of our work which concerns the way to « reach » this personal experience, so we shall examine how one can make the students produce narratives about their experience.
We shall develop some theoretical questions, examine what could be efficient methodologies and present and analyse some narratives we have collected.
We make use of some concepts which have been developed by the French didacticians, mainly Brousseau and Chevallard. References of their works are given in the bibliography; moreover we give short illustrations at the end of this paper.