Understanding Teachers' Professional Development Through their Interactions with Resources: a Multilingual Project

TL;DR

This paper discusses a multilingual project that explores teachers' professional development through their interactions with teaching resources, focusing on translation, conceptual understanding, and resource notions across 14 languages.

Contribution

It extends the Documentational Approach to Didactics (DAD) internationally by analyzing translations and conceptualizations in multiple languages, enriching understanding of teachers' resource interactions.

Findings

Insights into translation processes of DAD across languages

Enhanced understanding of resource concepts in different linguistic contexts

Lessons learned from initial project steps

Abstract

The Documentational Approach To Didactics (DAD) aims to study teachers' professional development through their interactions with their resources for/from teaching. It has been introduced in the French community of didactics of mathematics in 2007, then extended at an international level. It has been introduced as an entry in the Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education in 2020. The DAD-Multilingual project (2020-2021) is dedicated to gather and confront the translations of this entry towards 14 languages. The project main goals are: making available -- for students as well as for researchers - a presentation of DAD in various languages; deepening the DAD concepts themselves in thinking their possible instantiations in different languages; questioning the translation processes; and questioning the notion of resource itself, resource for/from teaching. The lecture presents this project, and draws some lessons from its first steps.