During the summer of 1990, while taking my holidays to teach a university course of physics for elementary teachers, I also tutored one of the tenth-grade students at my school in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. In return for working with him for free, I had requested permission to audiotape our sessions; I wanted to use the transcripts as data sources for a chapter that I had been inยญ vited to write. It so happened that I discovered and read Jean Lave's Cognition in Practice that very summer, which inspired me to read other books on matheยญ matics in everyday situations. Two years later, while conducting a study with my teacher colleague G. Michael Bowen on eighth-grade students' learning during an open-inquiry ecology unit, I discovered these students' tremendous data analysis skills that appeared to be a function of the deep familiarity with the objects and events that they had studied and mathematized earlier in the unit. I reported my findings in two articles, 'Mathematization of experience in a grade 8 open-inquiry environment: An introduction to the representational practices of science' and 'Where is the context in contextual word problems?: Mathematical practices and products in Grade 8 students' answers to story problems'. I Beginยญ ning with that study, I developed a research agenda that focused on mathematiยญ cal knowing in science and science-related professions. During the early 1990s, I was also interested in the notion of authentic practice as a metaphor for planning school science curriculum
CONTENT
1 Toward an Anthropology of Graphing: An Introduction -- 1.1 Graphing is Pervasive -- 1.2 Nature of Practice -- 1.3 Reading Graphs as Semiotic Practice -- 1.4 Graphs as Sign Objects -- 1.5 Graphing as Rhetorical Practice -- 1.6 Graphs as Conscription Devices -- 1.7 Conclusion and Outlook -- One: Graphing in Captivity -- 2 From โ{128}{152}Expertiseโ{128}{153} to Situated Reason: The Role of Experience, Familiarity, and Usefulness -- 3 Unfolding Interpretations: Graph Interpretation as Abduction -- 4 Problematic Readings: Case Studies of Scientists Struggling with Graph Interpretation -- 5 Articulating Background: Scientists Explain Graphs of their Own Making -- Two: Graphing in the Wild -- 6 Reading Graphs: Transparent Use of Graphs in Everyday Activity -- 7 From Writhing Lizards to Graphs: The Development of Embodied Graphing Competence -- 8 Fusion of Sign and Referent: From Interpreting to Reading of Graphs -- Appendix: The Tasks -- A.1 Plant Distributions -- A.2 Population Dynamics -- A.3 Isoclines -- A.4 Scientistsโ{128}{153} Graphs -- Notes -- References
