Exploring resistance in a university setting: the role of visual mediators

The goal of this research is to investigate the role of visual mediators in university students’ solving processes. Specifically, this study aims to explore the relationship between resistance, understood as the tension students experience when encountering something new, and visual mediators, which are elements of mathematical discourse that support communication. The research is framed by commognition theory, locally integrated with the concept of resistance, which guided both the design and analysis. The participants, consisting of engineering and mathematics university students, worked in pairs to solve tasks during task-based interviews, with the entire problem-solving process video-recorded. The results suggest a potential connection between the use of different visual mediators and the emergence of moments of resistance. In particular, resistance appears to arise when students obtain conflicting results from different mediators and struggle to integrate them. These moments tend to be overcome when students construct new narratives that allow them to connect the different realisations of the mathematical objects involved.