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This study describes an elementary teacher's implementation of sociocultural theory in practice. Communication is central to teaching with a sociocultural approach and to the understanding of students; teachers who use this theory involve students in explaining and justifying their thinking. In this study ethnographic research methods were used to collect data for 4 1/2 months in order to understand the mathematical culture of this fourth‐grade class and to portray how the teacher used a sociocultural approach to teach mathematics. To portray this teaching approach, teaching episodes from the teacher's mathematics lessons are described, and these episodes are analyzed to demonstrate how students created taken‐as‐shared meanings of mathematics. Excerpts from interviews with the teacher are also used to describe this teacher's thinking about her teaching.

The purpose of this teaching experiment was to investigate eight seventh-grade pre-algebra students' development of algebraic thinking in problems related in growth and change pattern structure. The teaching experiment was designed to help students (1) identify and generalise patterns in relationships between quantities in the pictorial growth and change problems, (2) represent these generalisations in verbal and symbolic representations, and (3) build effective connections between their external and internal representations for pattern finding and generalising. Findings from the study demonstrated that the students recognized patterns in related problems that enabled them to describe generalised quantitative relationships in the problems. Students modeled their thinking using different external representations-drawing diagrams, creating tables, writing verbal generalisations, and constructing generalised symbolic expressions. Seven of the eight students primarily created and interpreted diagrams as a way to generalise verbally and then symbolically.

This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of indigenous Peruvian Amazonian youth pursuing higher education through urban migration to contribute to the resilience of their communities, place‐based livelihoods, and indigenous Amazonian identities. Youth and their communities promoted education and migration as powerful tools in the context of educational inequality, racial discrimination, and threats to their communities' ways of life from colonization and natural resource extraction.