Investigating the affordances of a flipped mathematics classroom from an activity theoretical perspective

Abstract

Flipped Classroom as a pedagogical framework has gained popularity at secondary and tertiary levels of mathematics education, but there is a lack of research based on a solid theoretical foundation. This article considers the flipped mathematics classroom from the perspective of affordances and cultural–historical activity theory. The empirical background is based on semi-structured interview data from eight first-year computer-engineering students following 1 year of flipped classroom teaching. The thematic analysis of the data indicates that the flipped format offers a range of affordances at various levels of the activity system. This article advances research on affordances for mathematical learning in a flipped classroom pedagogical frame, presenting operational affordances out-of-class, action affordances at the mathematical task level and finally activity affordances at the collective level.