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Reciprocal eye contact is a significant part of human interaction, but its role in classroom interaction has remained unexplored, mostly due to methodological issues. A novel approach in educational science, multiple-person mobile gaze-tracking, allows us to gather data on these momentary processes of nonverbal interaction. The current mixedmethod case study investigates the role of teacher-student eye contact in interpersonal classroom interaction using this methodological approach from three mathematics lessons. We combined gaze-tracking data with classroom videos, which we analyzed with continuous coding of teachers' interpersonal behavior. Our results show that teacher communion and agency affect the frequency and durations of teachers and students' gazes at each other. Students tend to gaze their teachers more during high teacher communion and low agency, but qualitative and quantitative differences between the teachers and their classes emerged as well. To conclude, the formation of eye contacts is situational and affected by momentary interpersonal changes as well as the qualities of teacher-student interactions.

Teacher’s gaze communicates consciously and unconsciously her pedagogical priorities to the students. By creating and responding to eye contact initiatives, people can communicate both status and affection. This research explores the frequency of teacher-student eye contacts and their connection to teachers’ scaffolding intentions. The data consisted of mobile gaze tracking recordings of two teachers and stationary classroom videos during three collaborative mathematical problem-solving lessons. The quantitative analysis showed that most of the teacher gazes on student faces did not lead to dyadic eye contacts and those gazes that did, occurred often during affective and cognitive scaffolding. These results offer us novel and important insight in the nonverbal part of scaffolding interaction.

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With the myriad theories generated through research over the years, a continuing challenge for researchers is to navigate the multitude of theories in order to communicate their research, integrate empirical results, and make progress as a field by building upon empirical research. The Social Unit of Learning project was purposefully designed so that researchers from multiple disciplines with different theoretical perspectives could work together to examine the complexity of the mathematics classroom. In this paper, we reflect on the multiple analytical accounts generated from the project, drawing from the notions of complementarity and commensurability. Two parallel analyses, applying the commognitive framework and the theory of representations respectively, are used as illustrative examples for discussion regarding complementarity and commensurability. The paper addresses two focal questions, as follows: in what ways do divergence or contradiction in incommensurable analytical accounts reflect methodological discrepancies or fundamental differences in the underpinning theories? Furthermore, in what ways do the accounts generated by the parallel analyses predicated on different theories lead to differences in instructional advocacy? The answers to these questions provide empirically-grounded insights into the consideration of incommensurability in educational research, and suggest ways in which researchers and practitioners might apply the notion of complementarity to reconcile or exploit incommensurable analytical accounts that have resulted in different instructional advocacies.