Approaching Proof in a Community of Mathematical Practice

Mathematical proof is a current issue in mathematics education research and there is a renewed emphasis on proof in the ongoing revisions of school curricula in many countries. This book offers a fresh perspective on the subject. It describes students' encounters with proof at a mathematics department in Sweden. The empirical data ranges from students' survey responses, transcripts of interviews with both lecturers and students to observation protocols of lectures and instructional material like textbooks and examinations. A main contribution of the book is a new theoretical frame that shows how a social practice approach can usefully be combined with theories about proof obtained from earlier mathematics education research. This frame was developed to analyse the data and structure the results, but has a much wider scope. In particular it allows the author to vividly describe the complexity of mathematical instruction and explain the contradictory views of proof in the empiricalmaterial. This book serves as an introduction to the field and will be of interest to mathematicians, mathematics educators, teacher educators, the authors of curricula as well as students in mathematics.