Documentational approach to didactics
Résumé
Mathematics teachers interact with curriculum and other resources in their daily work, and their work with resources includes selecting, modifying,
and creating new resources, in-class and out-of-class. This creative work is termed teacher documentation work, and its outcomes teacher documentation.
Typical curricular resources include text resources (e.g., textbooks, curricular guidelines, student worksheets), or digital curriculum resources (e.g., digital interactive textbooks). However, as there is now nearly unlimited access to resources on the web, teachers are often at a loss to choose the most didactically and qualitatively suitable resources for their mathematics teaching. Hence, the study of resources and mathematics teachers’ interaction/work with those resources has become a prominent field of research (e.g., Pepin et al. 2013), not least because curriculum reforms in many countries go through the provision of reform oriented curriculum materials that are seen to help teachers enact the curriculum suitably and aligned with the reforms.
In theoretical terms, the work of teachers with curriculum resources has been studied from many angles and theoretical perspectives (e.g., Remillard 2005; Pepin et al. 2013), for example in the Anglo/American research literature through the notion of ‘enacted curriculum’. In continental Europe, the notion of “Didaktik” is a common concept (e.g., Pepin et al. 2013). This entry describes, explains and illustrates the Documentational Approach to Didactics (DAD), which has its roots in French European Didactics.