Semiotic mediation: fragments from a classroom experiment on the coordination of spatial perspectives

In this paper, I shall discuss some fragments from a teaching experiment on the coordination of spatial perspectives, carried out in several 1st and 2nd grade classrooms over the last twenty years and now being tested also in pre-primary schools. The experiment is framed by an interpretation of semiotic mediation after a Vygotskian perspective (Bartolini Bussi and Mariotti 2007), where drawing, language (in both its oral and written form), gestures and symbolic play are related to each other. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first, some data from the experiment are presented to describe the long term process of internalization of tools in real life drawing, considered as a problem solving task. In the second part, the outcomes will be reconsidered to describe a theoretical perspective, common to other teaching experiments, for the realization of processes of semiotic mediation in the mathematics classroom.