PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2020
Boston, Massachusetts
Investigating instructors’ perceptions of IBL: A systemic functional linguistic approach
Page: 227
Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) teaching practices have been hard to characterize in mathematics education research, as mathematics instructors interpret and engage with these practices in different ways. Using systemic functional linguistics (SFL), specifically the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), we analyzed responses to the question “what is IBL” given by 12 mathematics instructors who were teaching with IBL. Our analysis was guided by the following question: What do the language choices of a group of undergraduate mathematics IBL instructors reveal about their perceptions of IBL? We identified how the instructors opened up, closed down, and changed the strength and focus of their messages through their grammatical and lexical choices. We found that instructors softened their language when defining IBL but used sharper and intensified language with less room for negotiation when talking about teacher and student roles in IBL classrooms.