The development of the Internet and the abundance of digital resources, in addition to the emergence of new forms of teacher collective work, lead to new developments and uncertainties in teaching and learning of mathematics. These upheavals have given rise to new theoretical needs: how to analyze teachers’ work when they prepare for their teaching? How to conceptualize the relationships between individual and collective work? How to follow the related processes over the long term?

Ten years ago these theoretical and practical needs led to the proposal of a new frame, the documentational approach to didactics, in the field of mathematics education (Gueudet & Trouche, 2009). This approach has developed in relation to other approaches in the field, in France and internationally. It has resulted in approximately twenty theses, crossed other theoretical frames throughout the development of research programs at the national level (ANR ReVEA in France for example) or international (European projects such as MC2, projects in Argentina, Brazil, China, Lebanon or Senegal). The initial field, mathematics at secondary school, has been expanded from Kindergarten to University, and to other fields of application: languages, biology, chemistry, physics.

Alongside these developments the approach has been enriched by new concepts (“daughter resources”, “mother resources”, meta-resources, disciplinary affinity, documentational incident, documentational expertise or documentational trajectory); the methodology of reflective investigation has developed in several directions, in particular for the analysis of collective forms of documentation work. At the same time new questions have emerged, highlighting the need for new research programs. It is to take stock of these advances and questions that a three-day conference has been organized in Lyon (France) in May 2018, gathering 130 people from 30 countries.

The procedings of the conference, containing all the accepted contributions, are online. The videos of the main moments of the conference (opening ceremony, plenary lectures, panel and closing ceemony are also online. The conference gave rise to a book, The 'Resource' Approach to Mathematics Education, published in November 2019 in the Springer series Advances in Mathematics Education.

The conference has been followed by a workshop (31th May and 1st June) dedicated to young researchers.

Gueudet, G., & Trouche, L. (2009). Towards new documentation systems for mathematics teachers? Educational Studies in Mathematics, 71(3),199-218.

Pictures: Vincent Brault, Mohammad Alturkmani, Christian Mercat & Marlène Tognifode