Conceptualizing teachers’ interactions with resources in crossing languages and cultures

This paper introduces this special issue aiming to deepen and extend research on mathematics teachers’ work, from a resource perspective, by taking language and culture into account, and exploring two questions: How are teachers’ interactions with resources interpreted and modeled across contexts? And, What challenges and insights emerge through recent efforts to engage these models in cross-cultural (and linguistic) research? The fields of resources, language and culture in mathematics education are each extensive, and we do not attempt to survey comprehensively across them. We have chosen instead to propose three approaches on resources in mathematics teachers’ work that developed somewhat contemporaneously from three different countries with differing linguistic, curricular, and social contexts, corresponding to the work of the three guest editors. The models developed through these approaches are driven by the educational, and so cultural and material conditions of the time and the location of each author, and allow us to propose preliminary answers to our two guiding questions. We then move to pull the threads from these models together, and discuss the contributions to this Special Issue. This results in more robust and nuanced responses to our questions, and in identifying two themes that emerge from research that sit at the convergence of studies of teachers’ interactions with resources, languages, and cultures: an invisibility-visibility dialectic and a local-global tension. Finally, this study leads us to consider a new region of mathematics education research.