This paper reports on a study of two norms of an instructional situation in high school geometry—Geometric Calculation in Algebra—that consisted of confronting practitioners with representations of practice as a way to stimulate them to relay their knowledge of practice. The purpose of the study was to determine whether participants recognize two hypothesized norms and how those participants evaluate actions that breach them. The focus of this paper is on our use of the Appraisal system (Martin and White 2005) in Systemic Functional Linguistics to detect evidence of participants’ evaluation of the breaches of one of those norms.

Session Type: Brief Research Report