Policies and Implementation of Digital Resources: Theoretical Considerations and Illustrative Cases from Greece, Israel, and the USA

The goal of this chapter is to showcase and characterize the diversity of interactions between policy and implementation of digital resources for teaching and learning mathematics. Based on a review of the professional literature on educational policy and implementation, we put forward a set of conceptual distinctions, including the following: types of policy (e.g., policy as governing text vs. policy as negotiation of power), typology of objects of implementation (e.g., material-centered vs. material-interactive), and roles of stakeholders (e.g., original vs. secondary proponents of an innovation, government-affiliated policymakers vs. researchers and teachers as policymakers). These distinctions are first illustrated by means of several past studies on mathematics education digital resources and then are systematically put to use in the context of three ongoing R&D projects from Greece, Israel, and the USA. These projects, as different as they are in respect to their goals, operation, and policies involved, are comparable with respect to their digital components, namely digital platforms containing collections of digitalized resources for teaching and professional learning of mathematics teachers. The chapter concludes with remarks about the emerging patterns of policy implementation relationships and suggestions for future research.