Rituals and explorations in mathematical teaching and learning: introduction to the special issue

This special issue comprises seven studies and a commentary piece, which relate to various aspects of rituals and the “ritual-exploration” dyad in learning, teaching and learning-to-teach mathematics. The theme of the special issue arose from Sfard and Lavie’s (Cognition and Instruction, 23(2), 237–309, 2005) “ritual” vs. “explorative” dyad, on which a Working Session was held during the PME conference in 2016. Three central themes are addressed in the papers of this special issue: (1) the logic of ritual, and why rituals are so persistent in mathematics classrooms; (2) the co-existence of rituals and explorations, including the question of whether rituals and explorations are a binary or a continuum; and (3) alternative theoretical conceptualisations of the ritual-exploration dyad, focusing in particular on what can be learned about rituals from social and critical theory, as well as socio-linguistics. In this introduction, we first give an overview of each of the papers and its unique contribution. We then synthesise the answers given by the papers to the three themes described above.