The aim of this paper is to investigate and compare lessons given in primary school teacher education in Japan, Finland and Sweden. We analyse one lesson from each country and compare them using a common framework. Chevallard’s anthropological theory of the didactic (ATD) is used to frame this analysis and in particular to model teacher educators' didactic organization of the lessons. The focus is on how the didactic organizations of the teacher educators relate to the mathematical and didactic organizations of primary school. Based on official documents and viewpoints of the teacher educators, we also discuss how the contents and descriptions of the national curricula, and the different traditions of the teaching practices in each country, influence the didactic organizations found in the lessons. 

This paper investigates how Japanese mathematics teachers produce and share didactic knowledge together. It is a case study of a post-lesson reflection meeting so-called open lesson. The crucial idea of this study is the dialectic between the specific and generic level of foci of the participants’ reflections about the observed teaching practice; namely, about applied teacher’s specific didactic technique for achieving a specific mathematical goal, and more general pedagogical issues such as realisation of the objectives of mathematics education. This dialectic is mediated by the meso-level notion of mathematical activity, described in the guidelines for Japanese national curriculum. The application of the scale of levels of didactic co-determination, provided by the anthropological theory of the didactic into the analysis shows in what way the dialectic interplay between the teachers’ comments with focus of the specific and generic levels influences the development and establishment of the Japanese teachers’ shared professional scholarship.  

This case study investigates to what extent a specific theory and a practice of mathematics teaching − the Japanese structured problem solving, as formulated by K. Souma can be transferred and applied in a new context (Sweden). The analysis is based on tools from the anthropological theory of the didactic. It turns out that the Swedish teacher can manage the didactic techniques, which are supported by a didactic theory shared within the community of Swedish teachers. However, there are common didactic techniques within the Japanese structured problem solving approach for which this is not the case, and which were indeed difficult to manage for the Swedish teacher. Among these were techniques related to bansho (blackboard organisation); letting the students formulate a kadai (derived task) of the lesson; and kikan-shido (monitoring students’ work to plan a subsequent whole-class discussion). Further, the paper provides an ecological analysis on the underlying conditions and constraints that brought about this phenomenon − a discrepancy concerning the didactic praxeologies of teachers. In Japan, teachers focus on the students’ personal development in the processes of the reflective and collective way of learning, while the Swedish teacher focuses more on individual student’s achievement of the knowledge.