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Advances in Mathematics Education

Rina Zazkis
Patricio Herbst Editors

Scripting
Approaches in
Mathematics
Education
Mathematical Dialogues in Research and
Practice
Advances in Mathematics Education

Series Editors
Gabriele Kaiser, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Bharath Sriraman, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

International Editorial Board

Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (São Paulo, Brazil)
Jinfa Cai (Newark, NJ, USA)
Helen Forgasz (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia)
Jeremy Kilpatrick (Athens, GA, USA)
Christine Knipping (Bremen, Germany)
Oh Nam Kwon (Seoul, Korea)
More information about this series at www.springer.com/series/8392
Rina Zazkis • Patricio Herbst
Editors

Scripting Approaches in
Mathematics Education
Mathematical Dialogues in Research
and Practice
Editors
Rina Zazkis Patricio Herbst
Simon Fraser University University of Michigan
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

ISSN 1869-4918     ISSN 1869-4926 (electronic)

Advances in Mathematics Education
ISBN 978-3-319-62691-8    ISBN 978-3-319-62692-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62692-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954382

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018

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Foreword: Script and Subscript

One thing (among many) that reading this book has led me to realise is that scripting
preceded transcripting in mathematics and mathematics education – by at least a
couple of thousand years. Some of the common-currency pieces mentioned in more
than one chapter (such as Plato’s Meno, Galilean dialogues, elements of Robert
Record’s textbooks from the 1550s and 1560s) are all imagined pieces, pieces of
literary non-fiction to use an anachronistic label. As a short instance, here is a brief,
engaging, as-if educational interaction between two characters called Master (mean-
ing ‘teacher’) and Scholar (meaning ‘student’) from Record (cited and discussed at
length in Fauvel (1989), p. 4):
Master: […] So that now you see, that 160 and 136 do make in all 296.
Scholar: What? This is very easy to do, me thinketh I can do it even such. There
came through Cheapside two droves of cattle; in the first was 848 sheep,
and in the second was 186 other beasts. Those two sums I must write as
you taught me, thus.
However, early text-based depictions of teaching both in professional and in
research journals took the form of a short narrative account of a (presumed actual)
lesson or, starting around the early 1960s I believe, occasional brief transcripts of
teacher–student or student–student spoken exchanges. Questions of the veracity or
fidelity of such transcripts did not explicitly feature initially, but the presentational
form of such transcripts was much influenced by the antecedent genre of play script:
identified speakers, seeming non-overlapping turns, occasional para-lingual or pro-
sodic indicators such as pauses or tone of voice, conventional spelling, ‘stage’ direc-
tions, etc. (For more on the significant notion of antecedent genre, see Jamieson, 1975.
For an instance using this notion within mathematics education, see Gerofsky, 2011.)
And the nice calling of pre-service teacher productions of such texts ‘lesson play’
(Zazkis, Sinclair & Liljedahl, 2013) serves to augment this connection. The subtitle
of Zazkis and colleagues’ book (A Tool for Research and Professional Development)
points to the significant and complex interweaving of contemporary scripting in
mathematics education of these two sources and resources. A general question then
is how does scripting relate to transcripting and what can one learn from the other?

v
vi Foreword: Script and Subscript

I recall from the mid-1990s watching a videodisc (then an instance of new edu-
cational technology) intended to be used by pre-service teachers. It was not specific
to mathematics teaching; instead, it was primarily concerned with classroom man-
agement. But it offered an early example of pedagogic material where the user
could apparently make certain choices with regard to particular practices and then
the various branching ‘consequences’ could be seen, depending on which option
had been selected. Unlike with videotape recordings of actual classroom lessons,
this and other such discs tried to indicate a certain openness with respect to teacher
decisions in the moment.
Two things in particular about these videodiscs caught my attention: firstly, the
tacit presumption of generality, namely, that certain teacher behaviour or practice
would always result in a specific student response (cause and effect) and that, sec-
ondly, these scenarios were all (necessarily) acted (and were based on pre-created
scripts rather than improvised), as opposed to being a recording of actual classroom
events. For me, at that point in time at least, they lacked credibility because of this
(they also were not very well acted, which interfered with a presumed suspension of
disbelief).
But less than a decade later, with the significant development of sophisticated
resources brought into existence through the ThEMaT project’s animation/story-
boarding computer tools (tools that have assisted 15 years of striking research and
teacher education explorations) and, more recently, the online version called
LessonSketch, the educational plausibility of such created ‘lessons’ markedly rose.
And it is work based on these ideas and tools also developed jointly for teacher
education and research purposes that constitute the other core pillar of this book.
But before delving further into some of the issues this book raises, I would like
briefly to return to an element of my own academic history. I spent 15 years (from
1983 to 1998) working at the newly formed Centre for Mathematics Education at
The Open University in the UK, and one of its major foci was the compilation of
excerpts from videotapes of school mathematics lessons. Two features distinguished
much of the material generated: the first was the fact that the primary reason for
recording this footage of actual classroom teaching was to make video anthologies
for distance education courses about mathematics teaching, courses primarily
intended for practising teachers, even though it gave rise to much research work as
well. The second was that the group had access to BBC television crews, producers
and an outside broadcast unit, resulting in a very high-end (television transmission
quality) recording, as well as always two points of view (two cameras recording all
the time).
As with many other groups, these recordings were edited into what Herbst and
Chazan (2003, p. 6) term ‘artefacts’ rather than simply left as ‘records’ (a distinc-
tion I will return to very shortly), even if they significantly started life as a record of
an actual. Much alteration of the actual was subsequently carried out (such as com-
bining shots from two cameras, occasionally altering the time order of events, mas-
sive shortening and the editing of time within a continuous sequence): in general,
these actions involved forms of removal or alteration of the actual in order to attempt
to heighten and simplify experience, not least the removal of perceived ‘noise’. As
Foreword: Script and Subscript vii

David Wheeler (1996) once commented, ‘a pedagogical device can be too noisy, too
full of distractions, to achieve its objective’ (p. 324). And these videotapes were
indeed intended to be pedagogical. Despite being interfered with, however, they still
seemingly preserved a path through to the actual.
It is worth considering to what extent and in what ways the various chapters in
this book similarly engage in the removal of noise (in all its forms). Or, alterna-
tively, there is the prospect of the reintroduction of aspects of noise, whether liter-
ally or figuratively, in a possible attempt to mark stark portrayals more ‘real’ or
‘lifelike’: the sound of chalk on the board, the background rumble of whisperers at
work, an interruption with an announcement over the PA system and the smell of
lunch permeating from a nearby cafeteria. One significant element can be seen in
terms of emotions (of both teacher and students), discussed extensively in the
Watson and Mason chapter, but that also reappear as a significant element in the
storyboarding context in the chapter by Rougée and Herbst, comparing and con-
trasting the text and storyboard contexts. And in terms of ‘generalising’ teaching,
there is not just the look of the ThEMaT classrooms, but also the significant issue of
audible voice, which are currently human rather than ‘animated’ as the images are
and therefore filled with the particularities of the speaker (including markers of
geography, education, gender, social class, race, etc.). As Caleb Gattegno often
drew attention to, what to stress and what to ignore? And for what ends?

Events, Records and Artefacts

One way of thinking of data in mathematics education is as records of events. Some

are closer to the actual event than others; some capture more of the event than oth-
ers. None are the particular event itself, which occurs in time and then vanishes,
never to return. It is only such records that allow us to step outside time, to re-enter
the event in order to study it (at times, repeatedly). The adage that teaching takes
place in time, while learning takes place over time (see Mason, 2002), not only
encourages a sense of the asymmetry of teaching and learning but also suggests that
the former would be appreciably easier to study than the latter.
All along the way, whether intentionally or not, this book engages strongly with
the themes that the above paragraph raises, not least: the nature of events in math-
ematics education, how to generate pertinent records which are not records of
‘actual’ events (though of course there nonetheless were events of which these were
records), the shift from record to artefact1 to be used as a research probe and the
reasons for the perceived plausibility of records/artefacts other than an assertion
(sometimes simply presumed) of the event’s actuality. The list goes on and on.

1
Nathalie Sinclair mentioned to me that it is curious that within instrumental genesis, it is the word
‘tool’ that signals the more worked-over element than its counterpart ‘artefact’, while here ‘arte-
fact’ labels the more ‘processed’ element, the one shaped by other intentions.
viii Foreword: Script and Subscript

A significant common theme that permeates this book, starting from the title, is
that of scripting, the creation of (seeming) classroom ‘transcripts’ (whether by
researchers or teachers, current or future) as tools for teacher education and math-
ematics education research. The double hedge of ‘seeming’ and scare quotation
marks around the word transcripts is intended to signal solely that there are signifi-
cant (and therefore interesting) shifts at work from the common presumption that,
for example, the presence of a textual transcript (usually a second-order record)
guarantees the prior existence of the event of which it is the (authentic) record. (This
is akin to the way that Roland Barthes (1980/2010) wrote about the photograph in
relation to what was photographed.) A script is not a transcript. The former engages
much more with the imagined than the actual. I suggest scripts are about the puta-
tive future and transcripts about the past.
In particular, a number of authors here make reference to ‘fictitious but plausi-
ble’, ‘putative students’, ‘imaginary characters’ and ‘hypothetical students’ – all
indicators that the scripts are to be taken as actual. Again, I am led to wonder how
does scripting relate to actual classroom practice (or, indeed, in the case of Mamolo’s
chapter, to parent–teacher conferences)? Is it like trainee surgeons undertaking vir-
tual surgery before actually operating on live patients? What are necessary points of
contact with the actual, for a scripted lesson to be judged as ‘plausible’? And then
there is the question of how to do research on such scripts. For instance, Chazan,
Gilead, and Cochran’s chapter intriguingly contains an analysis of an algebra les-
son (script) as if it were a lesson (transcript): are there any differences at all in the
analytic techniques used?
The bulk of the focus here in both cases (but especially the second one) has been
novice teacher education. The earlier years of THeMaT involved working with
groups of experienced secondary geometry and algebra teachers in order to ascer-
tain from their discussions of fictional classroom animations created expressly with
‘breaches’ in order to provoke talk about such presumed violations of practice. But
the majority of the chapters here connected to this strand have a new-teacher educa-
tion focus as well.

 Focus on Language in Adjudging the ‘Reality’ of a Script:

A
Looking Toward the Future

One of the things I realised when reading this book is how scripting (unsurprisingly
at one level) focuses attention firmly on what is to be said (even though the written
script is itself generated first rather than being a transcript of what was said) and
indeed what may actually be said, should it be read aloud. But it does so by being
written (as opposed, say, to having short videos made by pre-service teachers, voic-
ing both teacher-character and student-character parts). I can well see how this
focuses attention of novice teachers on their words and the projected expectations
of what students would/might say. And it can strongly influence what these
Foreword: Script and Subscript ix

soon-to-be-teachers will say once they find themselves in an actual classroom. And
more than one chapter here details significant shifts in that presumed classroom
language.
But one of the things that experienced teachers have is a far better sense of such
‘classroom language reality’ (even if they are less aware of how strongly they may
be actually generating aspects its specific features – see, for instance, Herbel-
Eisenmann and Cirillo, 2009.) Yet what did not yet seem to be in focus was to have
such experienced teachers script lessons to serve as a mirror for their voices too.
(The chapter by Herbst and Milewski does discuss what they call StoryCircles,
which refers to a group of experienced teachers working on creating an animation
script.) And then there is an interesting issue of whether their scripts would make
them more aware of things they do verbally.
Are such scripts more ‘real’ if they more closely resemble an actual classroom
transcript (see Gail Jefferson (2004a, b) for her self-styled ‘gold standard’ of tran-
scription)? How are we best to educate teacher candidates about the real? Is it by
having them create the real? Do scripts continue to privilege what is said in class-
rooms? One instance is the phenomenon of overlapping speech intruding on turn-
taking. None of the examples of scripts in this book reflect this commonplace
language phenomenon (just like the vast majority of play scripts), nor several other
central elements that the field of conversation analysis documents. What about ges-
tures? What about non-propositional language? And some significant research on
mathematics classroom language has also identified key teacher-move linguistic
elements: instances include revoicing (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993), meta-com-
menting (Pimm, 1994), teacher spoken lexical bundles such as ‘What I want you to
do is’ (Herbel-Eisenmann & Wagner, 2011) and the teacher use of conjunctions
(González & Herbst, 2013). This is not intended as a criticism: rather, it is simply
an observation about the issue of fictional versus actual (not unrelated to the way
that actors and directors need to lift language from the written play script to render
it speakable, to render it into speech) and how each can impinge upon and influence
the other.
One of the things about a record of an actual event is its specificity in regard to
that event. (Someone said, ‘Everything that happens happens with 100% probabil-
ity’.) But that specificity can at times get in the way (see, e.g., Chazan and
Herbst, 2011) as can the desire to make it ‘more real’. One of my papers that never
got written involved analysing drawings of grade 1 students that arose from math-
ematical problems. I recall in particular the most detailed and elegant depiction of a
submarine sandwich, so ‘real’ that my stomach started to rumble. But such authen-
ticity in depiction is not part of the mathematical aesthetic concerning diagrams.
I recently wrote:
Linguist Michael Halliday (1993) has written extensively on nominalisation being a central
force in the development of scientific thought, along with lexical density, interlocking defi-
nitions, syntactic ambiguity, grammatical metaphor and semantic discontinuity. In mathe-
matics too, I believe, everything ends up as a noun and, as an aid to depersonalisation, as a
noun in subject position (viz. concepts are seen to be animate, grammatically). (Pimm,
2017, p. 270)
x Foreword: Script and Subscript

One possibility that these imaginative scripts also permits, though I have not yet
come across many instances of it, is that of other elements than ‘teacher-characters’
and ‘student-characters’ being given voice. What, for example, about the prospect
of ‘mathematics-characters’ speaking (e.g. zero, who turns everyone into itself
when multiplying but has no effect on anyone, gets ignored, when attempting to
tack itself on through addition)?
This diverse and engaging book both addresses current issues and techniques in
teacher education as well as exploring some probing research questions (employing
scholar-generated and participant-generated scripts is the distinction Herbst makes
in the introductory chapter). I have only touched on here some of the issues that this
work engenders, work which, as Zazkis’ final chapter details, provides much scope
for the future.

A Postscript

In the play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière (1670) has his character Monsieur
Jourdain declare, in response to the philosophy master with whom he is speaking,
‘Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in
prose without knowing it!’ Upon reading in Zazkis and Koichu’s chapter about
‘duoethnography’ (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2012), like poor M. Jourdain, I found
I’d been engaging in it for years (e.g. in this millennium, Tahta and Pimm (2001)
and, most recently, in Chazan and Pimm (2016), a chapter for the Jill Adler
Festschrift).

Simon Frader University David Pimm

Canada

References

Barthes, R. (1980/2010). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Chazan, D., & Herbst, P. (2011). Challenges of particularity and generality in discussing teaching.
For the Learning of Mathematics, 31(1), 9–13.
Chazan, D., & Pimm, D. (2016). Dilemmas and the teaching of mathematics: A conversation of
commitments, obligations and ambivalence. In M. Phakeng & S. Lerman (Eds.), Mathematics
education in a context of inequity, poverty and language diversity: Giving direction and
advancing the field (pp. 19–31). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Fauvel, J. (1989). Platonic rhetoric in distance learning: How Robert Record taught the home
learner. For the Learning of Mathematics, 9(1), 2–6.
Gerofsky, S. (2011). Ancestral genres of mathematical graphs. For the Learning of Mathematics,
31(1), 14–19.
González, G., & Herbst, P. (2013). An oral proof in a geometry class: How linguistic tools can help
map the content of a proof. Cognition and Instruction, 31(3), 271–313.
Halliday, M. (1993). Some grammatical problems in scientific English. In M. Halliday & J. Martin
(Eds.), Writing science: Literacy and discursive power (pp. 69–85). London: The Falmer Press.
Foreword: Script and Subscript xi

Herbel-Eisenmann, B., & Cirillo, M. (Eds.), (2009). Promoting purposeful discourse: Teacher
research in mathematics classrooms. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Herbel-Eisenmann, B., Wagner, D., & Cortes, V. (2011). Lexical bundle analysis in mathematics
classroom discourse: The significance of stance. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 75(1),
23–42.
Herbst, P., & Chazan, D. (2003). Exploring the practical rationality of mathematics teaching
through conversations about videotaped episodes: The case of engaging students in proving.
For the Learning of Mathematics, 23(1), 2–14.
Jamieson, K. (1975). Antecedent genre as rhetorical constraint. Quarterly Journal of Speech,
61(4), 406–415.
Jefferson, G. (2004a). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (Ed.),
Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13–31). Philadelphia, PA: John
Benjamins Publishing.
Jefferson, G. (2004b). A sketch of some orderly aspects of overlap in natural conversation. In
G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 43–60).
Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.
Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. London, UK:
Routledge Falmer.
Norris, J., Sawyer, R., & Lund, D. (Eds.), (2012). Duoethnography: Dialogic methods for social,
health and educational research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
O’Connor, M., & Michaels, S. (1993). Aligning academic task and participation status through
revoicing: Analysis of a classroom discourse strategy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly,
24(4), 318–335.
Pimm, D. (1994). Spoken mathematical classroom culture: Artifice and artificiality. In S. Lerman
(Ed.), Cultural perspectives on the mathematics classroom (pp. 133–147). Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Pimm, D. (2017). Making a thing of it: Some conceptual commentary. In E. de Freitas, N. Sinclair
& A. Coles (Eds.), What is a mathematical concept? (pp. 269–283). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Tahta, D., & Pimm, D. (2001). Seeing voices. For the Learning of Mathematics, 21(2), 20–25.
Wheeler, D. (1996). Reflections on different approaches to algebra. In N. Bednarz, C. Kieran &
L. Lee (Eds.), Approaches to algebra. Perspectives for research and teaching (pp. 317–325).
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Zazkis, R., Sinclair, N., & Liljedahl, P. (2013). Lesson play in mathematics education: A tool for
research and professional development. New York: Springer.
Contents

 n Dialogue and Stories as Representations of Practice:

O
An Introduction................................................................................................ 1
Patricio Herbst
Combining Geometrical Transformations:
A Meta-mathematical Narrative.................................................................... 21
John Mason
 onstructing Plausible, but Uncommon Stories: Gaining
C
Subversive Insight into the School Mathematics Tradition......................... 53
Daniel Chazan, Shoshana Gilead, and Kyle Cochran
 Tale of Two Digital Games: How Discussion Can Augment
A
Personal Narratives.......................................................................................... 73
Anne Watson and John Mason
 ho is Right? – What Students’ and Prospective
W
Teachers’ Responses to Scripted Dialog Reveal
About Their Conceptions of Proof................................................................. 89
Orly Buchbinder
 oving Toward Approximations of Practice in Teacher
M
Professional Development: Learning to Summarize
a Problem-Based Lesson.................................................................................. 115
Gloriana González
 ow Can Designed Reference Points in an Animated
H
Classroom Story Support Teachers’ Study of Practice?.............................. 147
Vu Minh Chieu, Wendy Rose Aaron, and Patricio Herbst
“ I Understand” Talk in Script Writing: A Case from
Euclid’s Elements............................................................................................. 163
Boris Koichu and Rina Zazkis

xiii
xiv Contents

 eachers Unpack Mathematical Conventions

T
via Script-Writing............................................................................................ 185
Igor’ Kontorovich
I nterjecting Scripting Studies into a Mathematics
Education Research Program: The Case of Zero-Divisors
and the Zero-Product Property...................................................................... 205
Dov Zazkis and John Paul Cook
 yes, Ears, and Expectations: Scripting as a Multi-lens Tool...................... 229
E
Ami Mamolo
 enerating, Appraising, and Revising Representations
G
of Mathematics Teaching with Prospective Teachers................................... 249
Sandra Crespo
 oes the Medium Matter?............................................................................... 265
D
Annick Rougée and Patricio Herbst
 reservice Teachers’ Learning Paths of Classroom
P
Discourse Through Scripting.......................................................................... 293
Woong Lim, Deborah Roberts-Harris, and Hee-Jeong Kim
What StoryCircles Can Do for Mathematics Teaching
and Teacher Education.................................................................................... 321
Patricio Herbst and Amanda Milewski
 ialogues on Dialogues: The Use of Classical Dialogues
D
in Mathematics Teacher Education................................................................ 365
Rina Zazkis and Boris Koichu
 n the Use of Dialogues: Looking Back and Looking Forward.................. 389
O
Rina Zazkis

References......................................................................................................... 399

Index.................................................................................................................. 421
Contributors

Wendy Rose Aaron is an assistant professor of mathematics education in the

College of Education at Oregon State University in the United States. Her research
focuses on identifying and leveraging learning opportunities for both teachers and
students inside instruction. She designs, implements, and researches classroom-
embedded professional learning opportunities for teachers and teacher candidates in
both online and face-to-face settings. She also researches secondary students’ par-
ticipation in mathematics classrooms to better understand, from the students’ per-
spective, instructional strategies that engage students in mathematical learning
opportunities.

Orly Buchbinder is an assistant professor of mathematics education at the

Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New Hampshire, in
the United States, where she teaches a variety of courses in both mathematics and
mathematics educations. She received her PhD in mathematics education from the
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2010 and completed a 3-year post doc-
toral fellowship at the University of Maryland, United States. Her main research
interests are in teaching and learning of reasoning and proving at the secondary
level.

Daniel Chazan At the University of Maryland in the United States, Daniel Chazan
holds the Jean, Jeffrey, and David Mullan professor of teacher education in the
Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership and is director of the
Center for Mathematics Education and co-director of Terrapin Teachers. Chazan
studies the teaching of mathematics in compulsory high school settings as a prac-
tice – embedded inside societal institutions, within societies with particular kinds of
structure – that is carried out by individuals with identities and knowledge. His
professional interests include student-centered mathematics teaching, the potential
of history and philosophy of mathematics and technology for informing teaching,
constructive links between educational scholarship and practice, and the prepara-
tion of future teachers.

xv
xvi Contributors

Vu Minh Chieu is an assistant research scientist at the School of Education,

University of Michigan, in the United States. A computer scientist and learning
technologist, his current research interests include interactive rich-media learning
environments, computer-based teaching simulations, and advanced communication
and collaboration tools.

John Paul Cook is an assistant professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State

University in the United States. He received his PhD in 2012 from the University of
Oklahoma and served as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of
Science and Arts of Oklahoma from 2012 to 2015. His main research interests
involve the teaching and learning of abstract algebra, particularly introductory ring
theory.

Sandra Crespo is a professor of mathematics education and teacher education at

Michigan State University in the United States. She researches learning and teach-
ing practices that disrupt and redistribute power dynamics in the mathematics class-
room. She uses design experiments at different grain sizes to introduce students,
prospective teachers, and practicing teachers to empowering learning and teaching
practices. Her goal is to learn with and from them what it takes to relearn mathemat-
ics and teach mathematics in ways that affirm and encourage traditionally marginal-
ized students to experience mathematics as a purposeful and meaningful human
activity. She teaches undergraduate and graduate mathematics education courses
and provides professional development to teacher learning communities.

Shoshana Gilead works at the Center for Educational Technology in Tel Aviv,
Israel, where she is involved in the development of digital interactive materials and
e-books for the learning of mathematics and in-service teacher training and research
on the learning of mathematics in a student-centered environment with the aid of
technology.

Gloriana González is an associate professor of mathematics education at the

Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign in the United States. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in
mathematics education. She is recipient of a CAREER grant from the National
Science Foundation. Her main research interests are mathematics teaching and
learning, teacher professional development, classroom discourse, and problem-
based instruction.

Patricio Herbst is a professor of education and mathematics at the University of

Michigan in the United States, where he has been employed for the past 18 years.
His research is in the area of teaching knowledge and decision making, with particu-
lar attention to the teaching of geometry and proof. Herbst has also been involved in
the design of technologies for online research and professional development and in
research that investigates the use of those technologies.
Contributors xvii

Hee-Jeong Kim is currently an assistant professor of mathematics education at

Hongik University, in Seoul, Korea. Her work focuses on mathematics teachers’
learning and improvement of teaching practices toward being more responsive to
student mathematical thinking in various contexts. She received her PhD in mathe-
matics education from UC Berkeley and worked as a research assistant professor at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Boris Koichu is an associate professor at the Department of Science Teaching of

the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He received his PhD from the Technion-
Israel Institute of Technology in 2004 and spent 2 years at the University of
California, San Diego, as a postdoctoral fellow. He was a faculty member at the
Technion between 2006 and 2017 and served as the head of the mathematics educa-
tion track from 2013. His research interests include task design for mathematics
teacher education, with special focus on mathematical problem solving and prob-
lem posing.

Igor’ Kontorovich is a lecturer/assistant professor of mathematics education at

the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His
research is concerned with advanced mathematics thinking at the secondary and
university levels. The chapter presented in this book is a part of an international
research project on the learning that occurs when students and teachers engage with
mathematical conventions.

Woong Lim is an assistant professor of mathematics education at the University of

New Mexico in the United States. His research interests include (mathematics)
teacher education and discourse, language, uses of technology, and equity in the
mathematics classroom.

Ami Mamolo is an assistant professor of mathematics education in the Faculty of

Education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada. She
received her PhD in mathematics education from Simon Fraser University in 2009
and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her
main research interests are in mathematical reasoning as manifested in the address
of social contexts, paradoxical statements, and spatial-visual explorations.

John Mason Retired after 40 years at the Open University in the United Kingdom
writing distance learning materials in support of teachers of mathematics of all ages,
John Mason is particularly concerned with the structure of attention when learning,
doing, and teaching mathematics, including problem solving and the use of mental
imagery. He has authored and co-authored numerous books including Thinking
Mathematically, Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing, and
with Anne Watson, Mathematics as a Constructive Activity. In retirement John
develops apps to help him work on problems and to use in workshops with
teachers.
xviii Contributors

Amanda Milewski is a research investigator at the School of Education, University

of Michigan, in the United States, where she serves as a senior investigator across
several research projects focused on studying mathematics teaching and the extent
to which practice can be learned and improved incrementally with practice-based
professional education. She received her PhD in mathematics education from
Michigan State University in 2012 and her MA in mathematics from Wayne State
University in 2005. Amanda has also taught a variety of courses focused on the
teaching and learning of mathematics at both the elementary and secondary level.

Deborah Roberts-Harris is a long-time teacher researcher and teacher research

advocate committed to empowering teachers through studying their own practices.
She spent 15 years teaching in public schools, has been a science curriculum spe-
cialist at local and state levels, and is in her 6th year as an assistant professor at the
University of New Mexico in the United States where she teaches courses on ele-
mentary science teaching methods and social justice.

Annick Rougée is a mathematics teacher educator and scholar interested in how

teachers manage in-the-moment decisions and exploring alternative methods for
their application in education research. After completing her MEd at Arizona State
University, she taught high school geometry and French for 3 years in Honolulu,
Hawai‘i. Those experiences led her to pursue her PhD in mathematics education at
the University of Michigan. After finishing her dissertation that examines how sec-
ondary mathematics teachers manage students’ apparently incorrect responses, she
has taken a position of assistant professor of mathematics education at Washington
State University, Tri-Cities, in the United States starting August 2017.

Anne Watson has two mathematics degrees and a DPhil in mathematics education
and holds fellowships of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications and the
International Society for Design and Development in Education. She taught math-
ematics in challenging secondary schools before becoming a teacher educator and
researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and she is the author
of numerous books and articles. Her main interest is in how mathematics can be
used to promote social justice.

Dov Zazkis is an assistant professor of mathematics education in the School of

Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University in the United
States. He received his PhD in 2013 from San Diego State University and completed
a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University. His main research interests are in
the teaching and learning of proof at the undergraduate level.

Rina Zazkis is a professor of mathematics education at the Faculty of Education

and associate member in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University,
Canada, where she has been employed for the past 26 years. Her research is in the
area of undergraduate mathematics education, with a general focus on mathematical
Contributors xix

content knowledge of teachers and the ways in which this knowledge is acquired
and modified. Teaching, learning, and understanding elementary number theory
have been a specific focus of her work before she turned her attention to scripting
approaches in teacher education. In 2016, Zazkis was appointed as Tier 1 Canada
Research Chair, a prestigious recognition for excellence in research and research
training.
On Dialogue and Stories as Representations
of Practice: An Introduction

Patricio Herbst

Abstract In this essay, the author frames the contents of the book by connecting
dialogues and storytelling to the notion of representations of practice, which he
examines from a semiotic perspective. The author argues that a constructionist
notion of representation supports taking the dialogues and storyboards presented in
this book as representations of practice and seeing them against the background of
other representations of practice such as transcripts, video records, and lesson plans.

Keywords Storytelling • Representation • Practice

The word scripting in the title of this book alludes to the practice of creating a script
or a dialogue, as if for a play. Dialogue has been used in philosophical scholarship
through history, including in works that deal with mathematical ideas such as Plato’s
(2002) Meno, Galileo’s (2001) Dialogues, and Lakatos’s (1976) Proofs and
Refutations. Robert Recorde (1956) and Alfred Renyi (1967) employed dialogue in
writing about mathematics, and Mendez (2001) notes that the practice has been
used in textbooks and classrooms. This collection on mathematical dialogue con-
tributes to that tradition, not only by adding volume to it, but also by adding new
dimensions of use of mathematical dialogue that are specific to mathematics educa-
tion scholarship and mathematics teacher education. In this introduction I map the
space of possibilities of dialogue in mathematics education scholarship, partly to
orient the reader to how the various chapters of the book are connected while mak-
ing unique contributions.

P. Herbst (*)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
e-mail: pgherbst@umich.edu

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018 1

R. Zazkis, P. Herbst (eds.), Scripting Approaches in Mathematics Education,
Advances in Mathematics Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62692-5_1
2 P. Herbst

On Dialogue as Storytelling

It is useful to think of scripting about mathematics as not limited to writing dialogue

and instead to see it in the larger context of storytelling: As soon as we do that, vari-
ous examples of mathematical storytelling could be brought to illustrate the diver-
sity within the genre. Books for children such as Anno’s Counting Book (Anno,
1977; see also Gailey, 1993), stories such as those compiled in The Man who
Counted (Tahan, 1993; see also Daisey, 1994), graphic novels such as Logicomix
(Doxiadis, Papadimitriou, Papadatos, & diDonna, 2010; see also Mancosu, 2011),
films such as Flatland: The Movie (Johnson & Travis, 2007; see also Stewart, 2007)
or the Flatland novel on which it is based (Abbott, 2002), and videos such as those
by ViHart (see for example The Calculus of Bad Driving1; see also Chang, 2011;
Gerofsky, 2015) show different ways in which the genre of storytelling serves the
communication of mathematics (see also Zazkis & Liljedahl, 2009). Multiple com-
munication modalities feature among this diversity.
There are at least two reasons why it is useful to think about scripting dialogues
in the larger context of mathematical storytelling. First, because storytelling ushers
our consideration of scripting into a space of choices among multiple communica-
tion modalities, a theme that emerges from the various chapters in the book: Some
of the chapters represent dialogue with written scripts, making occasional reference
to pictures, other chapters represent dialogue with storyboards and comic strips that
combine written speech balloons with sequences of pictures, and yet others repre-
sent dialogue with voice over animations or sequences of pictures. Second, because
it highlights that the dialogues are not just artifacts by themselves, but artifacts
being transacted in the context of actualizing relationships between the producers
and the consumers of a communication. In our cases these relationships include
ones between instructor and students in teacher education classes, or between
researchers and participants in research projects—with the dialogues produced or
read by either one of them. That the dialogues participate in these relational transac-
tions, particularly in the context of teaching or research highlights the possibility to
see these dialogues as representations: Not as self referential artifacts but as artifacts
that are part of a process of meaning production, even as open works, that is as rep-
resentations whose meaning is constructed in the interaction with the reader (Eco,
1989; Weiss, 2011).

On Stories as Representations

The stories in this book are multimodal representations. By representation I mean

that the stories are things that stand for something else, each of them is not only a
thing but it also means something else. While by that definition pretty much

1
https://youtu.be/pI62ANEGK6Q
On Dialogue and Stories as Representations of Practice: An Introduction 3

anything could be taken to be a representation by someone (e.g., the smell of juniper

means my grandmother to me, as it reminds me of the path to her house), I concen-
trate on things whose status as representations is publicly unproblematic, though
their meaning may not be unique.

On Approaches to Representation

Stanley Hall (1997) describes three basic approaches to representation that can be
useful to elaborate on the use of the word representation—the reflective (or mimetic),
intentional, and constructionist approaches. In the reflective, or mimetic, approach
the thing doing the representation is seen as a reflection of its meaning, as some-
thing that captures, well or poorly, a meaning that is entirely out in the world. A
current photograph of a person in their daily occupation might be taken as a repre-
sentation of that person. In the intentional approach meaning is imposed by the
speaker onto the artifact doing the representation, for example when we define a
group to be a set with a binary operation that is closed, associative, has an identity
element, and every one of its elements has an inverse, we take the word group to
mean exactly what the definition says. Finally, the constructionist approach recog-
nizes that language and other communication modalities are public, social resources
and “neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix mean-
ing in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational
systems—concepts and signs” (Hall, 1997, p. 25). The constructionist approach to
representation helps us understand the dialogues in this book as representations. A
contrast with how (mathematical) dialogue could be seen under the other approaches
can help us better understand the usefulness of the constructionist approach.
Those of us who have collected classroom data are likely very familiar with the
reflective or mimetic approach to representation as applied to records of classroom
interaction. Every time we go to a classroom and collect records (e.g., audio record-
ings, photographs, video recordings, students’ written work) those records repre-
sent the lesson we observed in a way that is most easily understood as reflective or
mimetic: The audio records play sounds like the real voices we heard though some
are inaudible as the location of the microphone induces bias; the images caught by
the camera reflect what was visible though sometimes the picture misses something
you wish you could recall with a better zoom or a better angle; the video record too
gives us a sense of the timeliness and the interaction, though we miss some voices
and some images; and while records of student work, for example in the form of
scanned images, show what students had eventually done, we miss how they did it,
its timing and its order. The language of capturing and missing is intrinsically asso-
ciated with the reflective or mimetic approach to representation: In this approach the
signs capture some of their objects and also miss some; the signs are judged by how
well they capture or how little they miss of the object, while the object is purport-
edly the real thing. The practices of transcription, their resources (e.g., the ways to
denote phonetic changes or to resolve ambiguous tokens such as indexicals) as well
4 P. Herbst

as the processes by which transcriptions are achieved (in particular, the likelihood
that a transcription is never really achieved) should suggest to us that a reflective or
mimetic approach to representation is a limited way to conceive of how records
represent classrooms, even though it is a natural entry point to discuss them as rep-
resentations. One could make a similar critique starting from the practices of video
recording (see for example Hall, 2000).
Opposite to the reflective or mimetic approach is the intentional approach to
representation. A lexicon, a music score, and the script of a play are canonical
examples of representation seen as intention: They represent to others what their
authors intended their work to be. Similarly, a set of pages in curriculum materials
represent the lesson conceived by the authors, the formula of the area of a triangle
represents how to find the area of a triangle, and a word calls forth its meaning.
Words like application, comprehension, execution, and implementation befit this
way of considering a thing as a representation—the receiver gets to apply a formula,
comprehend a sentence, execute a script, or implement a protocol or a lesson. In this
approach to representation, the sign is not expected to resemble the object but
merely to trigger an association with the object, depending among other things, on
knowledge of conventions. And the object is not a thing in this world, but an idea to
which the sign points by definition. This intentional approach to representation
seems close to dialogues in a completely different way than suggested by the reflec-
tive or mimetic approach. Words like revoice, expressions like procedural under-
standing, phrases like draw the tangent to a circle through an exterior point,
represent in the sense that they evoke ideas or actions.
The reflective and intentional approaches to representation have been illustrated
with examples close to mathematical and teaching practice to warrant a proposal to
look at stories as representations of practice using a constructionist approach. The
constructionist approach to representation gathers momentum from the opposition
of the reflective and the intentional approaches; it is useful to revisit the construc-
tionist approach in the context of the various examples of dialogue found in this
book. This is particularly important inasmuch as the objects being represented in the
pages of this book—mathematical practice or teaching practice—while addressed
by a pedagogical intention, are still practices being discovered. That is, they neither
exist as objects in nature nor are conceived by the mind alone. But to understand the
constructionist approach to representation it is worth now separating our consider-
ation into two cases—the cases in which the dialogue is authored by a mathemati-
cian or mathematics educator, such as the dialogues included in the chapters by
Mason, by Chazan and Gilead, by Mason and Watson, by Chieu, Aaron, and Herbst,
by González, by Buchbinder, and by R. Zazkis and Koichu on the one hand, and the
chapters in which the dialogues are authored by learners or participants of the activ-
ity organized by scholars, such as the chapters by Lim, Roberts-Harris, & Kim, by
Crespo, by D. Zazkis & Cook, by Rougée & Herbst, by Koichu & R. Zazkis, by
Kontorovich, by Mamolo, and by Herbst & Milewski.
In the scholar-generated stories, the constructionist approach to representation
applies in the following way. The story is offered as a representation of a practice
worth inquiring into, as an initial claim of worthwhileness directs the audience’s
On Dialogue and Stories as Representations of Practice: An Introduction 5

attention to it. But as soon as the reader’s attention is given, the story makes no
direct effort to teach itself. In particular, episodes in the story don’t self-identify as
illustrations of more general ideas but rather let the viewer see idiosyncrasies and
complexities in real practice; it requires the reader to engage in inquiry into the real
thing as this is mediated by the representation. Thus while the claim of worthwhile-
ness might profit from the notion of representation as illustration of an intended
idea, the opportunity for open ended exploration supported by the story harkens
back to the possibility that the story reflects real practice. And yet, the story is ren-
dered (written, drawn) with signs that must at some basic level be amenable to an
intentional approach to representation—the specific words being used, for example,
rely on the reader being prepared to understand them, that is, to associate to them an
intended or canonical meaning. I would argue that this approach to representation
should also guide our stance toward classroom transcript, video records, and any
other found artifacts of actual practice—they don’t resemble practice in an aspiring
but never fulfilled way, they enable an inquiry into practice that may in fact beget
better artifact collection (see, by the way, Antonioni’s, 1966, Blow Up, for a lasting
emblem of this approach to representation).
The constructionist approach to representation applies also to the participant-­
generated stories, though in a slightly different way. Scholars and educators issue
prompts or requests for work in which they represent concepts that the participants
have an idea of, to varied degrees of quality: They ask them to “show how you lead
a classroom discussion where you use moves such as revoice and orient,” or “show
how you explain why we divide fractions by inverting the divisor and multiplying.”
In the stories that participants might create in response, they reveal the meanings
they make of some of the ideas in the prompt. The scholar can now use those stories
as if they were representations, this time relying on the reflective approach, treating
those stories as a reflection of the participant’s practice. Thus the intentional
approach to representation is present in the issuing of the prompt, but the story that
at one time might be seen merely as an expression of understanding of what the
prompted concepts really mean, can contribute to generate a universe of new mean-
ings, that, albeit mediated by signs themselves and hence subject to being inter-
preted as intended, create for the scholar a reflection of a reality, a mental or
performative reality, that also calls to being understood.
The extent to which the constructionist approach to representation incorporates
elements of the reflective approach and the intentional approach is similar across all
the chapters included in the book, but the loci for the operations of seeing through
signs (as per the reflective approach) and evoking (as per the intentional approach)
are different for the two sets of chapters. They also help us understand how the set
of dialogues and stories in this book are different from stories with unabashedly
pedagogical intention and plot, such as McCloud’s (1993) Understanding comics or
the videos in the Khan academy collection (www.khanacademy.org).
6 P. Herbst

Representations of Practice

As we move to discussing representations of practice it is paramount to cast doubt

on the notion that practice can be captured in any comprehensive or even unprob-
lematic way by any representation. Practice, to the extent that it is Practice rather
than just an instance of it, is not captured by its representation and cannot be evoked
as a story, but it can be constructed through interaction between its stories and what
they supposedly stand for. Likewise, it is paramount to cast doubt on the notion that
practice is merely the expression of abstract conceptions, skills, or dispositions
which are themselves triggered by representations such as their names. But practice
is never only Practice: to the extent that it is embodied in an instance of practice, it
is realized with the stuff of life, it requires an amount of coping with stuff, or dealing
with the physical world in ways that prevent it from merely just showing itself
(Dreyfus, 1991).

Semiosis and the Constructionist Approach

To represent is, basically, to use one thing to mean another, to engage in semiosis or
communicate through the use of signs (as opposed to by physical or biological
cause and effect). Peirce (1897/1955) conceives of signs as composed of three ele-
ments: the representamen, or the thing in the world that calls attention to something
else; the object, or the something else being called attention to; and the interpretant,
or the conceptual organization that permits the taking of the representamen as a
pointer to the object (i.e., instead of as a thing in itself). A simple example might
help understand how we use these ideas.
Consider the image shown in Fig. 1. This is the photo2 of an artifact that might
be described as a thing by itself—a tin square painted in a hue of yellow with a
black, curved arrow in its center. But the artifact in Fig. 1 is also part of a representa-
tion or semiosis whereby it represents, or points to, an object—in this case, an
impending curve ahead to the right on the road being traveled. The interpretant
includes awareness of the context in which the artifact does its job (i.e., the tin
square is mounted on a wooden pole which is planted on the side of a road and at a
height visible from a driving car, as opposed to nailed to a wall in a bar), knowledge
of a set of related but different artifacts (e.g., there are other possible artifacts that
point to a curve to the left, or of a sharp curve to the right), and knowledge of the
possibilities afforded by the object (e.g., it would be impossible for the road to go
up and rightward). Crucially, a lot of tacit knowledge is involved in making this
semiosis work.

2
The photo could be taken as an artifact but for the sake of example, consider the photo itself as
transparent and think of the thing in the photo as the artifact of which we examine its role in
semiosis.
On Dialogue and Stories as Representations of Practice: An Introduction 7

Fig. 1. Impending curve. (Earl D. Walker/shutterstock.com)

Our explanation of representation and our analysis of this example may be too
simple as an introduction to the intricacies of semiosis as conceptualized by Peirce,
but they are enough to bring the point home to our analysis of representations of
practice. It is expected that a representation of practice, as a semiotic process, will
involve an artifact doing the pointing and practice as what is being pointed to. The
interpretant, with its large amount of collective tacit knowledge (Collins, 2010), is
where the constructive work of representation discussed above takes place. The
work of the interpretant includes both the noticing of aspects of the representamen
and the envisioning or conception of aspects in the object.

On the Practice Represented

And what do we mean by practice when we speak of representations of practice?

Lampert (2010) addressed the question of what we mean by practice by discussing
four related ways used to allude to it: (1) Practice as an occupation (as in ‘medicine
is a practice’); (2) practice as the opposite of theory, as when we distinguish how
things are in theory and in practice; (3) practice as any one of the components of a
trade or a way of life, as in the practice of gift exchange or the practice of homework
review; and (4) practice as a way to learn, as when one takes time to practice a musi-
cal instrument.
The first of those meanings is salient across chapters—the stories represent the
practice of mathematics teaching or the practice of doing mathematics. Likewise the
third meaning is present in several chapters, for example as we read in González’s
paper about the practice of summarizing a lesson, or in Chazan and Gilead’s chapter
about the practice of solving equations in algebra class, and also in others. We see
8 P. Herbst

aspects of the fourth meaning in the chapter by Lim and associates, where the two
preservice teachers are practicing how to manage discussions through the authoring
of storyboards. The second meaning can also be seen through some chapters:
R. Zazkis and Koichu deal with it as they discuss the writing of dialogue in teacher
education classes and Herbst and Milewski do it similarly as they discuss the design
and the examples of StoryCircles.
While Lampert’s distinction of those four uses is valuable, it seems that a defini-
tion is still needed especially for the first sense, which might help derive definitions
for the other three. In particular, Alasdair MacIntyre (2007, p. 187) defines a prac-
tice as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human
activity,” and Etienne Wenger (1998, p. 47) writes that “the concept of practice con-
notes doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social
context that gives structure and meaning to what we do.” There is a vast literature on
practice that could be consulted for complementary definitions and more depth (see
for example Dreyfus, 1991; Nicolini, 2012; Stern, 2000). The practices represented
in this book, mathematical practice and mathematics teaching practice, are pointed
to by stories rendered in multiple modalities. But how so?

The Construction of Practice Through Representation

The constructionist approach to representation that we espouse here has multimodal

artifacts (stories) associated with practice as an object3 of learning for preservice
teachers or as an object of inquiry for researchers: This object is very much in con-
struction through the work of representation. Goodwin (1994), in his analysis of
how policemen who were expert-witnesses at a trial analyzed video recordings of
the interactions between a suspect and policemen, notes that actions of the suspect
that lay viewers might consider meaningless could have particularly consequential
meanings for police practitioners.4
Insofar as novices who are engaging with a representation of practice might be
learning to see like a teacher (Sherin, 2007), their encounters with representations
of practice, including those that are technologically mediated, need attention. There
is semiosis at play even when novices watch a video record of an actual lesson as a
case of practice: There are countless physical details, movements, and expressions
in front of them, but not all of them point to features of the practice they are learning
about. Yet, some of such visible differences do point to important differences in the
object of learning. For example, in observing a video of a classroom teacher, the
teacher’s face or voice may have features that are noticeable and distinct (e.g., her
face may have a mole or her voice a low pitch range) though they are not likely to

3
Though as we show below, Dreyfus (1991) questions the use of the word object to refer to
practice.
4
Like Goodwin (1994), we are not endorsing such interpretations, but noting their specialized
nature.
On Dialogue and Stories as Representations of Practice: An Introduction 9

be important for learning about teaching; but her facial expressions or her word
choices expressed with that face and voice are likely to be important for learning
about teaching. Likewise, when representations of practice take the form of demon-
strations by a teacher educator in front of novices, some features of the action (e.g.,
its duration, the objects in the environment of the demonstration) need to be taken
as signs of something else rather than taken as features of actual practice: The time
taken by a demonstration may not be commensurate with the time that the actual
practice takes, but some timing issues such as the relative duration of the practice’s
components may be represented through the demonstration; likewise the furniture
in the university classroom may be quite different than that of school classrooms,
but the purpose the furniture serves in the demonstration might point to the need for
using some furniture in the actual classroom for similar purpose. For the case of
preservice teachers, these examples show that navigating how it is that representa-
tions of practice work—that is, how it is that the stories (recorded or scripted) rep-
resent practice—is part of the constructive work of representation.
A similar kind of construction can be observed as researchers engage with arti-
facts such as the stories created by participants in the papers included here. Several
of the chapters, including those by Kontorovich, by D. Zazkis and Cook, by Lim
and colleagues, by Rougée and Herbst, by Crespo, and by Koichu and R. Zazkis,
look at stories produced by participants as evidence of the quality of their engage-
ment in either mathematical or teaching practice. But the stories are not transparent
in giving us access to those practices: As artifacts they include features that might
attest to those qualities and also other features that can be ancillary, that play no role
in that semiosis. The chapters vary in the extent to which they articulate the methods
by which artifact-level differences are taken to be meaningful differences in the
qualities of the engagement with practice. A common characteristic of these chap-
ters is that they make interpretive comments about particular stories, with some
chapters (notably those by Lim and colleagues, and by Rougée and Herbst) also
trying out ways of looking across stories by coding them in ways that lose sight of
some particulars. This move seems essential to actually flesh out the notion that
scripting studies can be a way of doing research on the mathematical or teaching
practices of participants, as suggested in the chapter by D. Zazkis and Cook. The
articulation of the means to look across stories, even the articulation of the means to
look at one story, is the way to construct the representation, that is, to take the arti-
facts as representations of a practice.

What About Practice Is Represented by These Stories

In our explication of the notion of representation of practice, we alluded to practice

as the object of semiosis (in Peirce’s sense). But in his commentary on Heidegger’s
Being and Time, Hubert Dreyfus (1991) cautions readers about seeing practice as
objects or as an expression of a “belief system implicit in the minds of individual
subjects” (Stern, 2000, p. 55). Practice requires what Heidegger had called
10 P. Herbst

background coping with the world of being, a coping that is not only tacit but also—
inasmuch as it exercises our familiarity with the world—can be ineffable (akin to
what Collins, 2010, called collective tacit knowledge). Thus while statements of
beliefs, norms, or dispositions may be made about practices, they really need to be
taken as hermeneutic, that is those statements are interpretations or declarative rep-
resentations of practice; practice does not reduce to them (see Taylor, 1993).
Here is where stories, as alternatives to those statements of belief, norm, or dis-
position, can show their potential. I believe that because stories are amenable to also
represent some of what is involved in background coping, which is transparent in
statements of belief, norm, or disposition, we can gain from using stories to engage
in the representation of practice. I want to elaborate briefly on what about practice
we can glean from engaging stories in representing practice. The following exam-
ples go very minimally into illustrating how stories also represent background cop-
ing, but they are a start.

Stories Represent How Things Become

A story, as opposed to a statement, also represents a genesis or how things

become—not only how objects arrive into being, but also how actions are feasible.
Consider the following arithmetic statements: 235 − 49 = 186, which is true, and
534 − 146 = 412, which is false. The representations of their calculation (see Fig. 2)
tell different stories. They assist our understanding of how it became possible for
the statements to be made, even to suspect that it might be more feasible to write
534 − 146 = 412 than to write 534 − 146 = 53, 416.
Likewise a proof (or better, a description of proof, as Livingston, 1999, calls
what is usually written, which is, indeed, a representation) tells a story of a practice
(the practice of the proof itself, which can be reconstructed in interaction with the
description, as Livingston, 1986, shows); the proof is not reducible to the statement
being proved.
The contrast between the two proofs of the base angles theorem in Fig. 3 illus-
trates this. The cases of a displayed calculation and a written description of proof
are examples in which mathematical practice already incorporates storytelling as a
way to support, minimally perhaps, some of the background coping that goes into
bringing mathematical statements into being. Those stories provide basis for the
reasonableness or feasibility of statements or actions, reasonableness and feasibility
are forms of genesis; as we read those stories the making of the statements follows
naturally.

Fig. 2 Two subtractions 235 – 49 = (135 + 51 + 49) – 49 5 3 4

= 135 + 51 = 186 – 1 4 6
4 1 2
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“Dat why Anton Mescal come here an’ make him demand,” he said.
“But he never succeed. Da boy is safe.”
 CHAPTER XII.
DELORES UNMASKS.

The suspicions of Juan Delores were allayed at last, and he left the
boys with Felicia, while he retired to an adjoining room to prepare the
supper. Frank and Bart were given something to talk about.
“Mescal is near,” said Merry. “He may have that message on his
person. If fate will only bring us face to face once more!”
“If fate had directed one of my bullets!” exclaimed Hodge. “What do
you suppose that message contains?”
“You have asked me a question to which I cannot imagine the
answer.”
“Your father was very rich.”
“Yes.”
“And peculiar.”
“True.”
“Where is his wealth?”
“Heaven knows.”
“Where is his will?”
“Give it up.”
“That message must have told where to find his wealth and the will
he has left.”
“Perhaps so. But something tells me that was not all. I am certain the
message held something more—a secret of great importance.”
“Mescal is a desperate scoundrel. He will not be driven away easily.”
“I hope not.”
Felicia came and climbed on Frank’s knee once more.
“You have had trouble,” she said, in her tender, sympathetic way.
“Your papa is dead. Was the Good Stranger your papa?”
“I think so, little one,” said Frank.
“He was kind to me,” said she; “but he loved Dick most.”
“Dick—who is Dick?”
“Dick is my cousin. He lives here.”
“Here? Why, I have not seen him.”
“Oh, no! He is away now.”
“Away where?”
“He has gone with Old Joe. Once before he went away with Old Joe,
and was gone a whole month. But I miss him so much, for I love
him.”
“Is his name Dick Delores?”
“I don’t know. All I ever called him was just Dick. Oh, but he can
shoot and ride, and Joe is teaching him everything he knows.”
“How old is Dick?”
“One year older than I am.”
“The boy we saw with the old Indian!” exclaimed Bart.
“The boy who saved my life!” said Merry, who then told Felicia what
had happened at the entrance to the valley.
“That was Dick!” she cried, “and that was Old Joe! But why did Old
Joe want to shoot at you?” she speculated, her face clouding. “He is
papa’s friend.”
“He must have thought me your father’s enemy,” spoke Frank.
“He must,” nodded Felicia gravely. “Old Joe would not wish to shoot
a friend.”
“The mystery of the Indian and the boy is solved,” said Merry.
“Still, it’s rather singular,” muttered Bart. “Why should Delores let the
boy go with that old savage?”
“Papa sent Dick away with Old Joe,” put in Felicia.
“Sent him away?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I think he was afraid the bad men would carry Dick
off, same as they tried to carry me.”
Frank’s face showed that he was thinking deeply.
“Why should they carry Dick off?” he asked himself. “It must be that
there is treasure buried near here, and they are seeking to wring it
from Delores. But the man took extra precautions to protect the boy,
while he did not seem to fear for the safety of his own child, as he
left her entirely alone. There is much about this affair that is not clear
to me.”
Then Delores appeared at the door and announced that supper was
ready. They went back to the dining-room, Merry carrying little Felicia
in his arms.
The room was quite as pretty as the living-room. In the center stood
the table, covered by a clean, white cloth, with the dishes and food
upon it. A sideboard had been built in the wall. The chairs were of
the rustic variety, plainly also the handiwork of Delores. The cook-
room, in an ell-like part of the cabin, was shut off from view by a
swinging spring-door.
“Welcome,” said Delores.
“Thank you,” bowed Frank. “Your hospitality is appreciated, you may
be sure.”
“That’s right,” said Bart, as his eyes ran over the table. “Don’t believe
I was ever hungrier.”
They sat down, Delores at the head, with Felicia opposite. Frank and
Bart sat on the opposite sides of the table. When they were seated,
the little girl placed her soft white hands together, bowed her head,
and said “grace” in a simple, touching way.
Then, when the “amen” had risen from the lips of the three men at
the table, Delores lifted the cover of a platter and revealed to view
some broiled steak, the sight of which made Bart Hodge positively
ravenous.
That supper was enjoyed by all. Delores smiled when he realized
how hungry his visitors were, and he was pleased to see them
satisfy the cravings of their appetites.
Merry sought to satisfy Delores that he was no impostor; but the man
was on his guard, and it was not easy to tell what thoughts were
passing through his mind. Then Frank told of the adventures at the
entrance to the valley, relating how the old Indian had tried to
frighten them from entering, and had declared that Juan Delores
lived far away to the north.
“He faithful old fellow!” exclaimed Delores. “Once, long time ago, he
come here very sick—just able to crawl to door. My wife, she take
him in an’ doctor him; she get him well, though he have da fever. He
never forget. He do anyt’ing for us.”
“Even to commit murder,” said Hodge. “He would have shot one or
both of us if the boy had not hurled a rock and struck the barrel of his
rifle.”
Felicia clapped her hands.
“Dick can throw a rock just as straight!” she exclaimed. “Oh, he can
do lots of things, and Old Joe has promised to teach him all the
things he knows about the mountains, the prairies, and the woods.”
“His education is well begun,” said Frank, “but it is the finishing off
that will count.”
“Oh, he can read and write and all dat!” quickly exclaimed Juan. “My
wife, she be educated American, and she teach Dick and Felicia.”
The laughter passed swiftly from the face of the girl, and she sadly
said:
“Yes, mama used to teach us every day, but Dick was so hard to
teach—he was so wild. Now mama is gone, and I have tried to teach
myself; but Dick will not study at all.”
Frank felt like asking Delores some questions about the mysterious
boy with the old Indian, but, feeling that he had no right to do so, he
refrained. It seemed that Delores felt like explaining a part of the
mystery, which led him to volunteer:
“Anton Mescal, he come after Dick. Dat why I let Old Joe take da
boy. Old Joe protec’ him.”
“Then it is Dick, not Felicia, that Mescal wants?”
Delores nodded.
“If you have da word, you would know dat,” he declared.
And then it was that Merriwell began to feel that there was some
strange, invisible link that connected himself with this wild boy of the
mountains.
Delores had talked far more than usual with him, and he suddenly
showed a disposition to close up like a clam. Merry fancied it must
be because he thought the conversation was getting on dangerous
ground, and this caused Frank to lead it in another direction.
“How did you happen to settle here in this out-of-the-way place, Mr.
Delores?” he asked. “Why did you build your home here in this thick
piece of woods?”
“Hard to see it here,” was the answer.
“Then you did not wish it seen?”
“No.”
“And that was why you selected this valley, which might be passed
and repassed without finding a good way of descending into it?”
Delores nodded.
“It is a good place for a man who chooses the life of a hermit,” said
Bart, “but one is out of the world here.”
“Dat not true,” said Juan. “Dis is God’s world here! Da mountain, da
blue sky, da wild flower, da sweet air, da birds—it is God’s world.”
“It is beautiful!” murmured Felicia.
“But monotonous!” muttered Bart.
“Some men cannot choose,” said Juan. “I was one of dat kind. I have
to make my home where I can be safe.”
“That’s different,” said Frank.
Somehow, Delores seemed to fancy that both visitors looked on him
with suspicion after that speech, and he hastened to add:
“I do no crime—no. I do not’ing in this country to make me hide-a.”
They looked at him in silence. Somehow, that seemed to sting him
deeply, for he suddenly burst forth:
“If you knew! I have kep’ da secret long—I have kep’ da silence. Now
Mescal, he know all ’bout it. How he find it out I do not know; but he
will tell it everywhere. Da secret will be no longer one. Soon I shall
have to go ’way from dis valley. I have t’ought dat some time.”
“Oh, papa—oh, no, no, no!” cried Felicia, springing from her place
and running round to him. “Go away from here? Leave my dear
mama out there all alone? Oh, no, no, no!”
Her distress was great, and the tears appeared in her deep, dark
eyes. He caught her up and kissed her hair, holding her close to him.
“My little Felicia!” he said huskily. “I ’fraid da time come when we
must go; but, some time, mebbe, we come back to put da sweet
flower on mama’s grave.”
“Oh, why should we go, papa?”
“Papa have great many enemy. Now da bad man know him here da
enemy may find out soon. Papa go ’way, so him not be hurt.”
“Your cattle—what will you do with them?” asked Frank. “I suppose
those are your cattle in the valley?”
“Yes, dem mine. I know way to drive dem out. I sell dem.”
But still little Felicia was greatly distressed over the thought of going
away and leaving her home. She knew no other home, and that one
was very dear to her.
“Must we go, papa?” she sobbed. “Must we go?”
“I am ’fraid of dat,” he nodded. “We find some place else to live.”
Again he saw the visitors looking at him curiously.
“You t’ink I do somet’ing wrong?” he cried. “I do not’ing but fight for
liberty. I make enemies dat swear to kill me if da follow me to da hot
place. At first I feel no fear of dem. Den da gov’ment pronounce me
outlaw—put da price on me! I have to fly from my country. My enemy
follow. I have to fight for my life. I kill one, two, t’ree. Dat make dem
worse. All da relation swear to find me an’ take my head to da
gov’ment. I find myself hunted man night an’ day. Den, at last, when I
marry beautiful American wife, for her sake I have to find place
where we can live quiet. Den I come here, and we live here happy
together.”
It was an interesting and tragic story, and Merry did not doubt its
truth. So this man, Juan Delores as he called himself, had been
married to an American woman, who was the mother of Felicia.
Delores looked from one to the other of his visitors.
“You believe me?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Frank, while Bart bowed.
“I tell you who I am,” said the man. “Perhap’ you have heard ’bout
me.”
He rose to his feet and stood there before them, looking proudly at
them. There was in his pose now the manner of the born aristocrat.
He smiled a little.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I am da Don Jose Maria Queypo de Llano
Ruiz y de Saravia, of Spain!”
 CHAPTER XIII.
THE MESSAGE RECOVERED.

Frank had heard of him, a Spanish refugee and outcast, a man of

noble family, who had sacrificed himself and his fortune for what he
firmly believed was right and justice.
“Count De Saravia!” exclaimed Frank.
“Yes,” said the man.
Then he told them much of his story, and Felicia, who had known
nothing of it herself, sat and listened in wondering silence. But what
the count told did not clear up the mystery that puzzled Frank.
After the supper was over, they returned to the living-room, where
Merry opened the piano and played. Little Felicia sang for them, and
finally she crept into her father’s arms and fell asleep. He carried her
off to bed, and Merry and Bart turned and faced each other.
“Well?” said Hodge.
“Strange,” said Merry. “But the haze remains as deep as ever.”
“Deeper, if anything.”
“I feel like getting some air,” said Frank.
Hodge would have accompanied him when he rose to go out, but
instinct told Bart that Merry chose to be alone.
Frank passed along the deep wood path till he came to the open.
The moon had risen in the east, and was shedding its silver radiance
into Pleasant Valley. The little lake lay with a shimmering path of
silver moonshine across it.
The scene was calm and peaceful enough. Frank stood on the edge
of the shadowy woods and gazed upon the quiet valley. From far, far
away came the cry of some prowling wild beast, but that was the
only sound to break the calm of the peaceful night.
“She said the graves were up this way,” Frank murmured. “I will see
if I can find them.”
After a time he came upon them. They were not far apart, with a
great tree rising near at hand. One had a granite stone at its head,
and on the stone had been crudely chiseled the name “Lucy.”
Frank knew that was the grave of Felicia’s mother. The other grave
had been lately made, and no stone rose above it.
“My father rests here!” murmured Frank, as he knelt beside that
mound.
For some minutes he remained there, tears starting from his eyes
and trickling slowly down his cheeks.
“Poor father!” came softly from his lips. “You never knew what real
peace and happiness meant. Yours was a wild, strange life, and it
seems fitting that you should die as you did. But, oh, what would I
not have given to have been at your side! Perhaps I could have
comforted you. To-morrow I will bring flowers and place upon this
mound. A stone shall be erected, and here, dear father, you will
sleep your long, last sleep. At last you have found the peace and
rest that was denied you in life. God knows what is best, and He
doeth all things well.”
When he turned away he felt in no mood to return to the cabin at
once, so he wandered down toward the shimmering lake, which
seemed calling to him in the soft whispers of passing breezes. As he
approached the lake, he passed beneath some wide-spreading
trees, which gave a deep shadow.
Suddenly his attention was attracted by a moving object on the
bosom of the lake. He paused and gazed, and the moonlight showed
to him a canoe that seemed to be occupied by two persons. It was
approaching the side of the lake on which Merry stood, and he could
see the dripping paddle flash and shine in the moonlight.
Not a sound came from the canoe. There was no movement of either
figure, save the swinging arms of the one in the stern, who plied the
paddle.
Merriwell drew a little nearer to the shore, shielding himself carefully
and waiting. When the canoe was close in, he decided that it must
contain the old Indian, Joe Crowfoot, and the strange boy.
Barely had the craft touched the shore when out from places of
concealment leaped two men and flung themselves on the Indian
and the boy. One of the men clutched the boy, who fought like a
tiger-cat.
The other ruffian gave his attention to the old Indian, who whipped
out a knife and met his attack. The man fired a shot, but the Indian
closed in swiftly, as if not touched, and this forced the assailant to
drop his revolver and bring forth a knife.
Then a deadly and terrible battle took place there on the shore of
Lake Sunshine. The knives were heard to strike and grate together
as the foes met, hand to hand and face to face.
It fascinated Merriwell, and, for the instant, he paused to stare at the
spectacle. He saw the Indian’s assailant was almost a giant, and a
startling thought flashed through his mind:
“It’s Gunnison Bill! I did not kill him, after all!”
“Now, redskin, I’m goin’ ter carve yer up! I’ll just rip yer inter ribbons
in a minute!”
The voice was that of the big ruffian, and then Merry knew beyond a
doubt that the man was Gunnison Bill.
A cry came from the lips of the boy, arousing Frank from the strange
lethargy that seemed to have seized him. Without a sound, the
young athlete leaped toward the spot where the boy was doing his
best in the struggle with the man who had clutched him.
“I think I’ll take a hand here!” exclaimed Merry, as he sprang upon
the man.
It was the companion of Gunnison Bill, who had escaped on Frank’s
mustang.
Startled by Merry’s sudden appearance, the fellow whirled about,
trying to fling the boy aside. The moonlight fell full on his face.
“Anton Mescal!” cried Merriwell exultantly. “At last I have found you!”
“Frank Merriwell!” gasped Mescal, for it was the scoundrel who had
snatched the message from Merry in the New York hotel.
“Yes!” shouted Merry, as he fastened his hands upon the fellow. “I
believed fate would bring us together here! Now I shall recover the
message you stole from me!”
“Never! You’ll have to kill me first!”
“Then I shall kill you!” came the cold, hard words from Frank’s lips.
“Bill! Bill!” cried Mescal. “Help, Bill!”
“Bill is having his hands full,” said Merry. “Old Joe Crowfoot is
attending to him.”
“He can kill that old dog in a minute!”
“Perhaps, but Old Joe may get in a few licks while he is doing it.”
A fierce struggle between Frank and Mescal ensued. Mescal was no
match for the young athlete, but he felt that he was fighting for all
that he desired and held dear, so he put up a stiff struggle for a
while. At last Merry forced the fellow to his knees, fastening a clutch
on his throat.
“Give up?”
“Curse you—no!” hoarsely breathed Mescal.
Merry’s fingers shut off the man’s wind, and it seemed that the bones
cracked beneath that pressure. Still the desperado fought to the last,
though he gradually grew weaker and weaker.
Merry choked the man into insensibility. Having done this, he began
to search his clothes for the message. In course of time he found it,
within an inner pocket. Frank opened it and looked at it by the aid of
the moonlight.
“Thank Heaven!” he said. “I have it again! This is the message my
father wrote and sent to me.”
He had been so absorbed that he was quite unaware of anything
else that was taking place. Now, having thrust the message into his
pocket, he rose and looked around.
To his amazement, the canoe, containing the old Indian and the boy,
was gliding swiftly away over the lake, while on the shore lay the
bleeding body of Gunnison Bill. In the knife duel the ruffian had met
more than his match in Old Joe, who had ended the career of the
desperado. Gunnison Bill’s life of evil-doing was over.
Frank called to the Indian and the boy, urging them to return, saying
he was a friend; but they paid not the least heed, and the canoe kept
on till it melted into the shadow along a distant shore.
Anton Mescal lay quite still on the shore, and Frank feared he had
killed the fellow. On kneeling by the side of the scoundrel and feeling
for his heart-beats, Merry found that life remained in Mescal’s body.
“He’ll recover,” Merry decided. “I think I’ll truss him up.”
So he lifted Mescal and carried him up the bank to a large tree. The
unconscious villain was placed in a sitting position on the ground,
with his back against the tree, after which Merry stripped up the
man’s coat and bound him in that position.
Having disposed of Mescal thus, Frank hastened back toward the
cabin home of Delores. On the way he met Hodge.
“I thought I heard a shot,” said Bart. “Didn’t know but you were in
trouble, and that brought me out hot-foot.”
Hodge was ready for anything.
“You did hear a shot,” said Frank. “It was fired by Gunnison Bill.”
“Gunnison Bill? Why, he’s dead!”
“You are right; he is dead now; but we did not leave him dead in the
timber over yonder, as we fancied.”
“Didn’t? What has happened, Merry? Tell me as quick as you can.”
But Bart could scarcely believe the story Frank had to tell.
“You met Mescal there?” he exclaimed joyously; “and you have the
message?”
“Safe in my pocket,” said Frank. “I shall read it to-night.”
“I told Delores I would go out and see what the shot meant. He
remained to guard Felicia. Let’s return and let him know there is no
danger.”
So they went to the cabin, where they found Delores waiting, rifle in
hand, for anything that might occur. When he heard Merry’s story he
was even more excited than Bart.
“Mescal out there?” he panted. “Dat man must not git away! Take me
to dat man! He know my secret, an’ he be my enemy!”
It was not without serious misgivings that Merry led the way to the
spot where the struggle had taken place on the shore of the lake. He
found an opportunity to whisper to Bart:
“Watch him! We can’t stand by and see him murder Mescal, no
matter what Mescal may have done.”
But when they came to the tree where Frank had bound Mescal,
they found the man had recovered, broken his bonds, and escaped.
Delores was like a hound on the scent, and he followed the trail till it
ran into a piece of timber, where it was lost for the time.
“But I’ll take it up in da morning!” declared the refugee. “He must
make da fast track if he get away.”
The body of Gunnison Bill they buried that night not far from where
he fell.
And then, with Bart in the room where they were to sleep, Frank
Merriwell brought forth and read the strange and startling message
sent him by his dying father.
 CHAPTER XIV.
WHAT THE MESSAGE CONTAINED.

That message gave Merriwell the greatest surprise of his life, for it
told how Charles Conrad Merriwell, Frank’s father, after his first
wife’s death, had married another woman, whom he met in the West.
And it told how, by his second wife, Mr. Merriwell had had one son,
Richard, who was thus a half-brother to Frank. But Mr. Merriwell had
been hunted by his bitter enemy, Dion Santenel, and never had his
life been anything but one of trouble and fear. It was not such a life
as would make a wife happy and contented. Fearing Santenel might
find his wife and strike him, through her, Mr. Merriwell had hidden her
away in a safe retreat. But she was frail and delicate, and she had
not survived.
The second Mrs. Merriwell was a sister to the wife of the man known
as Juan Delores, and so to Juan Charles Merriwell took the
motherless boy, Richard. Juan had raised Richard there in that
hidden valley as if the boy were his own son, and there he had been
happy and contented, with Felicia, his cousin, for his only playmate.
When fate had brought Charles Merriwell and his first son together
once more, the lips of the man remained sealed concerning a portion
of his life. Thus it happened that Frank Merriwell had never
suspected the existence of a half-brother.
But, when the end came, Charles Merriwell summoned strength to
write a full confession. As he wrote it, he knew he had been followed
about by men who sought to wrest from him in some manner his
great fortune, or a portion of it, and it was his fear that they might
succeed after he was dead.
He sent Delores to Denver for a reliable messenger to take the
precious document to Frank. The messenger employed was a
detective belonging to an agency in the city, and he executed his
trust faithfully, for all that Anton Mescal, aware of his purpose,
followed him all the way to the Atlantic coast, seeking to get
possession of the precious document in the oilskin envelope.
In the confession Charles Merriwell charged his son Frank to take
care of Richard, bring him up properly, be both brother and father to
him.
“He is a frail lad in some ways,” wrote the dying man, “and he should
be trained and built up until he possesses a marvelous physique, like
your own, Frank. I give him into your hands for this task. He is your
brother, and I charge you to make a man of him—such a man as you
yourself have become. I am proud of you, Frank, for you are a son to
make any father proud. Dick is like you in some ways, but he is
unlike you in many. He is wild, impulsive, passionate, and hard to
govern; but I believe you can mold him into a splendid man.
“You know I am rich, and I leave all my wealth to be divided between
you and Richard, in case you carry out my instructions faithfully. The
will, which Juan Delores will give to you when you come to him with
the word, will make everything clear. He will also turn over into your
care your brother, Richard. I think there is no danger but you will be
faithful to this duty I have left you, but, should you fail to take charge
of Richard and care for him, you will see by the will that you are cut
off from ever receiving a dollar of my wealth.”
Frank felt a twinge of pain as he read this.
“Why did he have to write that?” he thought regretfully. “Ah! he did
not know me well, or he would have been certain I would do
everything in my power to carry out his instructions.”
Later on in the message was given “the word” which Frank was to
speak to Delores.
Hodge had seen enough to know how deeply Frank was touched,
and he retired as quietly as possible, leaving Merry sitting there
reading that astonishing revelation over and over again.
The night was far spent before Frank lay down to sleep. His slumber
was filled with dreams, and more than once he murmured:
“Richard—Richard, my brother!”

In the morning Frank spoke “the word” to Juan Delores, saying:

“I have recovered the message that was stolen from me by Anton
Mescal, and I have read it over and over. I wish to see my brother.”
Delores bowed.
“You shall see him soon,” he promised.
Then he went away somewhere, and, after a time, returned with the
last will and testament of Charles Conrad Merriwell, which he placed
in the hands of Frank.
“I was convinced last night,” he said, “dat it b’long to you; but I had to
swear to your father dat I never give it to any one who fail to bring da
word. What could I do? I did not know. I t’ink I find some way to let
you know da word after you give me all da proof dat you be Frank
Merriwell.”
“You have been faithful and true, Mr. Delores,” said Merry, with a
hand on the shoulder of the man. “I shall not forget. A Merriwell
never forgets.”
“Dat all right,” asserted Juan, flushing. “But had we foun’ Mescal last
night, I t’ink I would feel better now.”
“I do not believe Mescal will trouble any of us again,” said Frank. “It
was his object to keep me from finding out what I was to do, so that I
would not comply with the terms of the will. If I failed to take care of
my brother, I was to have no part in the property left by my father. A
false Richard might have been substituted, and there are a dozen
schemes whereby Mescal could have profited had he succeeded,
but he failed utterly, and now he will have to look out for himself.”
At this moment Felicia, laughing gaily, appeared at the open door of
the cabin, calling:
“Oh, Frank, come out!”
Merry had told her on the previous evening that she was to call him
Frank.
“What do you want?” smiled Merriwell.
“Come and see,” she urged. “I have a surprise for you. Oh, come
quick!”
Laughing, he complied. She grasped him by the hand and led him
round the cabin.
There, standing where the morning sunshine fell through an opening
in the Black Woods, were two persons, an old and wrinkled Indian
and a bright-faced, dark-eyed boy.
Frank was face to face with his brother.
 CHAPTER XV.
A REBELLIOUS SPIRIT.

“Hee-haw! hee-haw! hee-haw!”

Rattle-ty-smash! rattle-ty-thump! thump! smash! thud!
“Hee-haw! hee-haw! hee-haw!”
“Oh, ha! ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha!”
Pandemonium seemed to have suddenly broken loose just outside
the window at which Frank was writing.
The braying hee-haw was followed by such a smashing, and
crashing, and banging that it brought Merry to his feet immediately.
Then came a burst of wild, elfish boy laughter.
“What the dickens is he up to now?” exclaimed Frank, as he sprang
to the window and looked out.
The sight that met his eyes was both amusing and surprising. To the
tail of a small, long-eared burro, attached by means of a cord, hung
an old tin can. And the burro was hee-hawing and kicking furiously in
a mad endeavor to free himself from the thing which clattered and
thumped about his heels.
On the ground, in a perfect paroxysm of delight, rolled Dick, from
whose lips came the shrieks of elfish laughter. It was two days since
Frank had first met this, until then, unknown half-brother.
Wrapped in a dirty red blanket, sitting with his back against the wall
of the cabin, was Old Joe Crowfoot, who calmly smoked his long-
stemmed pipe, and regarded the youngster and the burro with the
gravity of a stone image.
“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” shouted the boy. “Look at Billy! Kick it again,
Billy! Oh, ha! ha! ha! Oh, ha! ha! ha!”
Billy kicked and rolled his eyes round at the persistent thing that
came banging back against his heels. There was a comical look of
mingled terror and anger in the eyes of the little burro. He plunged
and leaped about in various attempts to get away from the rattling
pail, which his heels had battered out of all semblance to its original
shape.
“Ugh!” grunted the old Indian, and he gravely continued smoking,
without moving hand or foot.
Then came a sudden, childish cry of distress, and round the cabin
Felicia came running. She rushed straight toward the little burro.
“Oh, Billy! Billy!” she cried. “Who hurt my Billy? Stop, Billy! I’ll take it
off!”
Heedless of danger, fearless of the flying hoofs and plunging beast,
she ran right up to the burro. A moment later she was knocked flat
as the little animal lunged round in its mad struggles to get away
from the banging pail.
A leap carried Frank Merriwell out through the open window, and it
seemed that another spring took him to the side of the child, which
he caught up in his arms.
At the same moment the string broke and the burro sent the old can
whizzing into the branches of a tree near at hand. Twice after this the
heels of the excited little beast twinkled in the air, and then, seeming
to realize that he had conquered at last, he let forth a triumphant
bray.
The boy sprang up and stood quite still, all the laughter gone from
his face.
“Are you hurt, Felicia?” asked Merry, as he held the girl in his strong
arms.
“Oh, no, no!” she sobbed. “But my Billy is hurt! Put me down—please
put me down!”
Frank did so, and she ran to the burro, clasping it round the neck
and sobbing as she showered the now quiet little creature with
caresses.