Framespaces: framing of frameworks

Socio-cultural analysis [18], design practice [20], and philosophy, stretching back at least to Rogoff, Rittle, and Heidegger, all point out that we arrive at different pictures of difficult problems depending on the frames within which we examine them [16]. Yet after all this time, this truism remains difficult to approach. What can we make of these different perspectives? This paper explores how one system, for classroom mathematics education, looks different from experimental, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological frames during the investigation and different again as we try to put the frames into relationship with one another, that is, as we create a framespace. These different frames contend with one another in defining the meaning and the design brief going forward. We coin the term framespace to describe the constituent set of frames and the relationships between them that must be understood to describe the summative results of the project.