From student scribbles to institutional script: Towards a commognitive research and reform programme for university mathematics education

Commognitive studies offer a nuanced lens on datasets that evidence micro-level accounts of mathematical experience – and are now starting to explore the theory’s capacity to support the design, tracing and dissecting of discursive shifts in medium/long term interventions. Here, we focus on two university mathematics education (UME) examples of such interventions. The Norway-based study engaged biology students with biology-themed Mathematical Modelling activities to challenge deficit narratives about the role of mathematics in their discipline and about their mathematical competence and confidence. The Brazil-based study engaged teachers with activities which feature mathematical practices from the past and in today’s mathematics classrooms to trigger changes in teachers’ narratives about how mathematics comes to be and how its emergence can be negotiated in the mathematics classroom. We show how the discursive shifts orchestrated by these interventions generate new narratives about mathematics and its pedagogy, de-ritualised participation in mathematical routines and, ultimately, meta-level learning.