Narrative research in didactics of Mathematics: short stories in the context of infinity

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain how the narrative research and the creation of short stories, using a physical experience, helped secondary school students (12 to 16 years old) to elaborate category answers while studying the actual infinity as a cardinal identity. The narrative investigation can be used, at least, with a triple sense: the phenomenon investigated (as a written or spoken result), the method of investigation (as a mean to construct or analyze the narrative phenomenon) and the use of narrative with different purposes (educational, reflection process, change, innovation improvement…). Therefore, narrative is a basic method of thinking, organizing the knowledge, and the reality where human experience is formulated through a short story. This new analysis procedure has allowed us to extract more information from these interviews since they had to be written in the form of short stories. Similarly, we have tried to innovate narrative research into the field of mathematic didactics. Our study favored the categorization of five different states, from less to more evolved.