This chapter aims to show the impact of culture on the learning of mathematics and consequently that studies of mathematics for teaching require strong theoretical frameworks that foreground the relationship between culture and pedagogy. For this purpose, we describe two different research projects in Southern Africa, each focused on the notion of mathematics for teaching. The first study analyses teacher learning of the mathematical concept of limits of functions through participation in a research community in Mozambique, and is framed by Chevallard’s anthropological theory of didactics. The second, the QUANTUM project, studies what and how mathematics is produced in and across selected mathematics and mathematics education courses in in-service mathematics teacher education programmes in South Africa, and is shaped by Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse. We argue that separately and together these two studies demonstrate that mathematics for teaching can only be grasped through a language that positions it as structured by, and structuring of, the pedagogic discourse (in Bernstein’s terms) or the institution (in Chevallard’s terms) in which it ‘lives’.

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