Anna Sfard - Thinking as Communicating: Human Development, the Growth of Discourses, and Mathematizing

Thinking as communicating

This book is an attempt to change our thinking about thinking. Anna Sfard undertakes this task convinced that many long-standing, seemingly irresolvable quandaries regarding human development originate in ambiguities of the existing discourses on thinking. Standing on the shoulders of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, the author defines thinking as a form of communication. The disappearance of the time-honored thinking-communicating dichotomy is epitomized by Sfards term, commognition , which combines communication with cognition. The commognitive tenet implies that verbal communication with its distinctive property of recursive self-reference may be the primary source of humans unique ability to accumulate the complexity of their action from one generation to another. The explanatory power of the commognitive framework and the manner in which it contributes to our understanding of human development is illustrated through commognitive analysis of mathematical discourse accompanied by vignettes from mathematics classrooms.

ANNA SFARD is based at the University of Haifa in Israel and holds a joint appointment as Lappan-Phillips-Fitzgerald Professor of Mathematics Education at Michigan State University and as Professor of Mathematics at the University of London. In a series of studies in Israel, Canada, and the United States, she has been investigating the development of mathematical thinking in both history and individual learning. Results of these studies, both theoretical and empirical, have been published in more than 100 articles and edited volumes, many of which have been widely cited.

Learning in doing: social, cognitive, and computational perspectives

Series editor Emeritus

John Seely Brown

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

General editors

Roy Pea

Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences and Director, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Stanford University

Christian Heath

The Management Centre, Kings College, London

Lucy A. Suchman

Centre for Science Studies and Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK

• Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication

• Lucy A. Suchman

• The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in Schools

• Denis Newman, Peg Griffin, and Michael Cole

• Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

• Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger

• Street Mathematics and School Mathematics

• Terezinha Nunes, David William Carraher, and Analucia Dias Schliemann

• Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context

• Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave

• Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations

• Gavriel Salomon

• The Computer as Medium

• Peter Bogh Andersen, Berit Holmqvist, and Jens F. Jensen

• Sociocultural Studies of Mind

• James V. Wertsch, Pablo Del Rio, and Amelia Alvarez