Some critical issues posed by ‘Theory and Practice of Lesson Study in Mathematics’ from a Western Perspective

This paper constitutes an attempt to produce a critical commentary on this volume that is informed by a ‘classroom action research’ tradition, which originated in the work of Lawrence Stenhouse and others at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia in England. It involved a series of projects, which engaged groups of ‘teachers as researchers’ in their classrooms, and stimulated the development of a research tradition that impacted across the UK and Europe and more widely in the latter part of the 20th century. The paper begins with a summary of the main ideas embedded in this tradition of collaborative classroom action research, and then goes on to discuss in their light a number of themes and issues posed by contributions in this volume. These include the respective roles of academic experts and teachers in the lesson study process, the role of teachers in constructing accounts of lesson studies and creating ‘knowledge platforms’, the role of teachers as researchers in relation to curriculum development, the use of learning theories to inform lesson study, and the problem of globalizing lesson study methodology across cultures and systems.