This book, and the range of chapters within it, take as its starting point the role of curriculum resources in mathematics teaching and its evolution. Teachers draw on a wide range of resources as they do their work, using and adapting these in various ways for the purposes of teaching and learning. At the same time, this documentation work (as it is referred to by Gueudet and Trouche, Chapter 2) acts back on the teacher and his or her professional knowledge. Documentation work is a function of the characteristics of the material resources, teaching activity, the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, and the curriculum context. The chapters that follow explore and elaborate this complexity.
An underlying assumption across chapters is an increasing range of textual resources for teaching and wide availability of digital resources. The empirical work that informs this chapter took place in mathematics classrooms with limited textual and digital resources, and it is this kind of context that gave rise to a broad conceptualisation of resources in mathematics teaching that included the teacher and her professional knowledge, together with material and cultural resources, like language and time. In Adler (2000) I describe this broad conceptualisation, theorising material and cultural resources in use in practice in mathematics teaching in South Africa. The discourse used is of a teacher ‘re-sourcing’ her practice – a discourse with strong resonances in documentation work.
This chapter builds on that work, foregrounding and conceptualising professional knowledge as a resource in school mathematics teaching. I begin by locating our concern with knowledge resources, a discussion that leads on to the methodology we have developed in the QUANTUM1 research project to adequately describe their use in mathematics teaching. This current research has as its major question, what and how mathematics comes to be constituted in pedagogic practice? Professional knowledge in use in practice, and how this shapes what is made available for learning, come into focus. The methodology we have developed is then illustrated through recent empirical work in two secondary mathematics classrooms in South Africa. These illustrations add force to the argument for foregrounding knowledges in use in descriptions of classroom practice and teachers’ interactions with resources. Moreover, while the methodological tools offered here emerge in response to a particular context, related data and theoretical gaze, they are, I propose, useful for studying the evolution of knowledge resources in use in teaching across contexts.

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