A Golden Braid:* Weaving Terry Wood’s unique threads of humanity in theory and practice

ABSTRACT While reading, in other articles, about the authors’ experiences with and perspectives on the work of Terry Wood, I have been struck by the many facets of Terry’s work as a mathematics educator (researcher, teacher, mentor, and friend) that emerge article after article. Having agreed to write some synthesis of the articles, I have chosen the metaphor of a braid, woven in different ways by different authors (co-researchers, doctoral students, colleagues, and friends). All speak of Terry’s basic humanity (my words) as they have appreciated her contributions, both personal and professional, to their lives and work. From this, I draw many threads and diverse weavings. Not least, I weave my own experiences of and with Terry in contributing to my own life and work. I borrow (from Hofstadter, 1999) the term “golden braid,” as I believe this special issue reflects, repeatedly, a “golden” braiding in our relationships with Terry.

I first met Terry Wood in 1988 at the International Conference on Mathematics Education (ICME) conference in Budapest. I had met her colleagues, Paul Cobb and Erna Yackel, at the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) conference in Montreal the previous year and had appreciated their use of "Radical Constructivism" (RC; e.g., Von Glasersfeld, 1987) in teaching and teacher development in mathematics. With colleagues from the Center for Mathematics Education at the Open University in the UK, we invited Paul, Erna, and Terry to be interviewed for our writings for teachers, and also to visit us in the UK the following year. In these early beginnings, I appreciated Terry's warmth and interest as we discussed our work with and for teachers and our research in education. I was especially interested in their use of RC as a theory for linking the learning and teaching of mathematics which seemed highly relevant to my own research (Jaworski, 1994).

Theoretical developments and links to practice
Several of the authors in this special issue write of Terry's engagement with RC; for example, Travis Miller (2023) writes: reality and, within the realm of mathematics education, constructions of mathematical concepts with no prescriptive expectation for the end result (Richards & von Glasersfeld, 1980;Miller, 2023, p. 7).
The early work of Cobb and Steffe, deriving from von Glasersfeld's theory of RC focused on the learning of individual children. This perspective was the basis of the Purdue Problem Centered Project, addressed in Berry et al. (2023). A teacher in the project, Janell Uerkwitz, writes: As a student myself I didn't consider mathematics to be a strong point and I sort of found a new appreciation for teaching and learning as we explored different ways that thinking occurs with children. It was validating for me as a former student and as a teacher. I was validating my own constructivist approach to learning. That there wasn't always a right method or a wrong method to do things.
These words recognize the idea that individual children, making meaning in mathematics, were not expected to reproduce the expected (right) methods, but rather to construct their own meanings. Deriving from Piaget (e.g., Piaget, 1980) and developed further by Cobb, Steffe, and colleagues (e.g., Cobb & Steffe, 1983), a form of "clinical method" was used in which researchers interviewed individual children, working on given mathematics tasks, to learn more about mathematics learning in the early years. This focus was of special interest for me, albeit in relation to research in secondary classrooms, since I was then focusing on mathematics teaching and associated learning in mathematics using RC as a theoretical base.
The Cobb, Wood, and Yackel team were interested in exploring learning of mathematics in school classrooms, going beyond the focus on the individual child to the influence of interactions between children and with the teacher. In particular, they invited teachers to join them in this research. Prospective teacher Audrey King writes: In the mathematics classes I have experienced, the focus has been entirely on procedures, often supplied by the teacher, and right answers. Terry's perspective was different. She focused on the students as discoverers of mathematics, emphasizing the conceptual understandings students generate with the guidance of a teacher, as opposed to direction by the teacher. In much of her work, I learned that she supported students developing such understandings by engaging in argumentation. . . . For me, one of the most impactful ideas from Wood . . . was how the teacher not only gave the students expectations for how to respond verbally, but how to respond emotionally during disagreements and mathematical arguments (King & Chamberlin, 2023, p. 41;my italics).
Interaction became an important construct in this research. For the Cobb, Wood, and Yackel team it led to a focus on argumentation, a construct designed to get students responding to each other in discussing mathematics ideas. One role of the teacher became to create tasks and situations where students could share their individual perspectives, allowing growth of knowledge through listening and responding to others. As such ideas were developed and the focus shifted from the individual child to the sharing and developing of mathematical meanings in a whole class of children, constructivism took on a more social perspective.
Travis Miller (2023) writes of Terry: While her focus on the individual learner carried over to her later work, Terry recognized the impact of engagement with other learners and the role of classroom culture in defining the constructs that students developed in mathematics, exploring the ways in which teachers might best promote argumentation and opportunities for cognitive conflict. . . . by the time of their Spencer Project in collaboration with scholars from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, the group had shifted to a more socio-constructivist view.
Here, Travis refers to argumentation as a key area of development in Terry's research. Expanding constructivist ideas to the social structures of a classroom, Terry and her colleagues focused on interactions between students as a basis for individuals to make mathematical meanings. Through argument, the teacher would encourage students to offer alternative perspectives and argue their meanings, allowing meaning to develop and be enriched through alternative perspectives. As we read from Audrey King above, students were also encouraged to engage emotionally during disagreements and mathematical arguments. Travis writes of the learning of mathematics with other students in a classroom, with the important role of the teacher being to facilitate interaction and challenge mathematical meanings through argumentation. Facilitation and challenge were indeed part of Terry's own persona as a teacher, as she worked with her own research students. Lindsay M. Keazer (2023) writes of Terry's commitment to constructivism with a "social constructivist learning lens": In this article, I explore the impact of receiving mentorship into research and theory of the field that was guided by a social constructivist learning lens . . . as many others have said in this special issue, Terry "lived constructivism." Her constructivist philosophies infiltrated her mentorship in every possible way . . . she understood that we each come to know and understand mathematics teaching and mathematics education in diverse ways and through our own journeys renegotiating our understandings (2023, p. 51).
We see, here, a reference to Terry's theoretical world and its influence on practice (relating to students learning mathematics in classrooms) expanding to the learning of her research students. The forms of practice here, for Terry, can be seen as guided by her constructivist theory; so, constructivism permeated Terry's professional work beyond the classrooma weaving of the theoretical and professional sides of her practice.
Lindsay suggests that Terry's mentoring of research students, such as Lindsay, was similar to her perspectives on teaching children in classrooms.
What stood out from this process are the parallels between her words about constructivism, applied to the elementary mathematics classroom, and her ways of mentoring me into the space of mathematics education research, theory, and practice. The 2 contexts are quite distinct: the elementary teacher facilitating children's mathematics learning compared with the professor/ advisor mentoring a mathematics teacher into the knowledge of the field. Yet, she attended to creating a context for my inquiry into exploring the connections between research, theory, and practice such that-rather than eying an insurmountable ivory tower-the process felt like an accessible and adventurous climb (2023, p. 51).
Staying for a moment with the contrast between RC and something called "social" constructivism (SC), the originators of RC perspectives (for example, Steffe and von Glasersfeld) have argued strongly that SC is not necessary, as a theory, since RC, dating back to the work of Piaget, includes the social perspective (see for example, Steffe & Thompson, 2000). Indeed, although some scholars have argued for SC as a legitimate theory for which the social dimension is central (e.g., Ernest, 1991), the theoretical nature of SC has remained somewhat vague, although very firmly related to educational practice, particularly in science education in which scholars have drawn on the work of Vygotsky (e.g., Edwards & Mercer, 1987). Other scholars moving beyond SC to sociocultural theory (e.g., Lerman, 1996), have argued for educational research (particularly in mathematics education) to be recognized as an important part of the sociocultural world. Indeed, my own work, having started in an RC frame (e.g., Jaworski, 1994), moved toward sociocultural theory when it could be seen that social relations in a classroom seemed fundamentally linked to aspects of family life and beyond (Jaworski & Potari, 2009), weaving new threads in social relations and educational (mathematical) meanings.

Practice linked to theory
The words quoted from Janell Uerkwitz above provide a strong indication that the constructivism she reports is strongly linked to her own classroom practice. I see this as an example of practitioners adopting theory because it speaks to the ways they wish to workin this case, a teacher supporting children in learning mathematics. This was true for me when I first met constructivism and related it to my own work as a teacher and researcher, working with other teachers.
The Purdue Problem-Centered Mathematics Curriculum Project, described in Berry et al. (2023), was based fundamentally in RC but with a shift that moved it toward SC. Betsy Berry writes: The Purdue Project intended to extend the research enacted with individual children and investigate children's learning in the setting of a real classroom through a teaching experiment. The goal was to extend both the theoretical and the experimental aspects of Steffe's work which was 1-on-1 research with 1 student at a time to the classroom setting where there would be 1 teacher with 20 children. The teacher, rather than researchers, would be the person that would be providing the instruction (2023, p. 19).
We see here a research team drawing teachers into the project and its theory, with the expectation that the teachers would take on the demanding work of translating this theory into classroom practice. Graceann Merkel, one of the project teachers, writes about her involvement in the project: After the first year, once the curriculum was collaboratively written, the second-grade teachers in our school corporation were given an opportunity to attend workshops and learn a different approach to teaching math with their students. ... My school corporation approved me to teach 4 days a week and the 5th I spent at Purdue for team meetings, group discussions, planning, watching videos that were taken in my classroom and other things (2023, p. 20).
Graceann writes, further, of "the listening and observation and questioning skills that I had developed as I worked on that project." It seems clear to the reader that her work in the project classroom with second-grade children both built on her own 15 years of experience and developed new ways of working with the students according to the theory of the project. In this way, constructivist practice developed within Graceann's classroom, and the researchers (Terry and Erna Yackel) were able to gather data and analyze student learning and its nature.
The writings of Cobb, Wood, and Yackel from this practice-based research made a strong impact on knowledge about classroom teaching and student learning both in mathematics and beyond. These researchers became lauded within the international mathematics education community. Götz Krummheuer (2023) writes that their research became the basis of a new project funded by the Spencer Foundation in collaboration with German researchers, The Coordination of a Psychological and Sociological Perspective. The German researchers brought sociological perspectives on classroom practice to contrast with the Purdue team's psychological perspectives of RC-resulting in the weaving of new threads. Götz writes: Terry belonged rather to those members who were dedicated to the psychological perspective whereas I came rather from a sociological stance. It was an exciting research cooperation, though the hopes for a fundamental integration of these 2 perspectives could not be fulfilled entirely. As Cobb and Bauersfeld (1995) concluded in their introduction of the final report of the project: This coordination does not, however, produce a seamless theoretical framework. Instead, the resulting orientation is analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. When the focus is on the individual, the social fades into the background, and vice versa (2023, p. 72).
I like very much the Heisenberg example: Weaving does not necessarily mean co-joining. The lack of a "seamless theoretical framework" is perhaps unsurprising, given the history of development through the years with a strong focus on involving teachers and developing practice. These elements pushed theoretical thinking toward the social, but the individual still had its own place in developing meanings. Götz's article provides insights into how sociological perspectives influenced the joint research at that time and, indeed, his own research since then. I see here a complex weaving of various strands. Starting from RC and building on Steffe's individual interviews with children, based on Piaget's clinical methods, the practices in whole class teaching required a move to making sense of children learning from and with each other-a more socially grounded perspective. Research with the German team led to sociological considerations of ethnomethodology and interactionism, the latter becoming important to a characterization of classroom learning in mathematics through interactions between students and with the teacher. The role of the teacher became central to developments in and through practice. Inclusion of teachers in the research team allowed practice to mediate the influence of theory. The articles here emphasize effects on teachers' personal and professional lives. The research development at this time led to threads from both mathematics learning and mathematics teaching being brought together to enrich the whole, but both making their individual contribution,

Personal and professional
As we read through the articles, we come to recognize that the authors laud Terry's consideration and care in both personal and professional relationships. Audrey King and Michelle T. Chamberlin (2023) write in their abstract: As a prospective mathematics teacher, the most inspiring observation I, Audrey, the first author, made about Terry Wood, from those who spoke at the May 2021 Memorial Event, was her passion for mathematics education as evidenced by the intermingling of her work and personal life. From the colleagues whom she invited to live in her home to the teachers she collaborated with to her son speaking of the ways his children's grandma watched them become mathematics learners, it was clear that both her personal and professional life was dedicated to the field (2023, p. 40).
In this special issue, we read about Terry's professional relationships with teachers, with doctoral students, and with colleagues in which her style of mentoring is deeply appreciated. Audrey King writes: She shared her house with colleagues and students, often for musical gatherings with various coauthors, and published journal articles and books with many of her friends, all of which astounded me. In conversations with Terry's son and daughter, I learned that her coauthors and colleagues were well known by Terry's children and her home was open to everyone (2023, p. 40).
Travis Miller (2023) wrote, "She blurred the line-if she even saw one-between academic life and personal life through her universal approach to engaging others and developing better understandings of the world." Gaye Williams (2023), a co-researcher who sums up her experience of working with Terry and observing the variety of ways Terry interacted with others, wrote: Terry's interest in the development of research students and early career researchers . . . increased their confidence in what they could achieve. Her approachability and humour put them at ease and encouraged them to discuss their own research with her and to talk with her about her research. Her generosity of spirit knew no bounds (2023, p. 36 We see in these extracts where the authors write of professional relationships, that the personal sides of those relationships, the feelings and, often emotions, are visible to observe. Lindsay M. Keazer (2023) writes: Terry's approach to facilitating these conversations consisted of a variety of talk moves: questioning, listening, validating, probing, introducing other voices/ideas to challenge my understandings, and encouraging me to experiment in my classroom. She scaffolded the process of teacher research through her gradual nudges toward exploring the implication of research and theories of the field in my practice. Her questions and encouragement empowered me to try new things without trepidation, and her validation of my noticing and reflections and encouragement to write about them made me feel like I generated prized knowledge worthy of dissemination. . . . She understood that we each come to know and understand mathematics teaching and mathematics education in diverse ways and through our own journeys renegotiating our understandings.
We also read about individuals' personal circumstances in which Terry's caring personality shines through. Carla V. Gerberry (2023)

Research interactions
The sections above have dealt with Terry's theory and its relation to practice, and her professionalism that has drawn on theory to support teachers and research students and, in some cases, colleagues in developing their own work with strength and confidence. I turn now to Terry's work beyond developing theory and using it to support her fellows. Although this special issue is not about research and its findings, we must recognize Terry as not only a thoughtful, caring, and inspiring teacher and mentor, but also as a research scholar in her own right. Her many academic papers in top journals, many of them referenced in articles of this special issue, speak to this. Götz Krummheuer (2023) writes: As I knew her, she had more ideas for her research and theoretical considerations than she could elaborate and publish due to her early death. I would have loved to share with her my ideas which I developed over the years of my academic life. I will not forget her openmindedness and joy of discussing our work and thinking.
The words "open-mindedness and joy of discussing our work and thinking" bring together what we have seen in sections above, Terry's qualities of listening to and encouraging others in their work and thinking, while bringing her own high quality of research and theory to the discussion.
In a project with Gaye Williams, Terry observed Gaye's activity as teacher-researcher, responding to students' classroom engagement. Gaye elaborates on an occasion in which Terry disagreed with her response to a student they had both observed in the classroom, thus challenging Gaye's response to the student and demonstrating argumentation with a research colleague. Reflection from Gaye on the event led to her deeper consideration of her own action, offering a justification related to the student's subsequent engagement. Gaye reflects on how Terry's challenge stimulated her deeper thought and ultimately another way of justifying her interaction with the student.
In the title of her article, Roberta Hunter (2023) uses the words: "Tracing the threads of research to establish equitable and culturally appropriate pedagogical practices within mathematical interactions and discourse for all learners" (my italics). This fits well with my metaphor of a braid. Here the threads are of research; they are linked to "equitable and culturally appropriate pedagogical practices," the professional side of Terry's work. So, we see Roberta weaving aspects of Terry's research with her personal and professional "pedagogical practices," the latter of which have been acknowledged powerfully in the quotations above. Roberta's pedagogy with Pāsifika and Maori students in New Zealand draws, also powerfully, on theory from Terry (i.e., Wood, 2002), saying She provides an important theoretical framework which she develops further to describe different environments within reform classroom cultures. Within this framework she extrapolated a "thinking dimension and axis" and "a participation dimension and axis" (p. 65). This framework provides a valuable tool for teachers and other educators to consider how different students are positioned differently through teacher questioning and actions in the learning environments (2023, p. 86). And relating this to her students in New Zealand, Roberta writes: [For] teachers of Pāsifika students, the challenge is not only to develop the pedagogy of reform classrooms premised within argumentation, but also construct them within culturally sustaining practices. ... ensuring a sense of cultural comfort for them to engage in the mathematical practices of mathematical justification and argumentation requires sensitively instituted culturally sustaining pedagogical actions ... But the outcomes for their mathematical achievement because of the reciprocal co-thinking, offers them potential rich and deep understandings they could not reach alone. Moreover, what Wood and her co-researchers suggest as important for extending mathematical learning in this research does parallel the sophisticated forms of collaboration many of these students experience in their home setting (2023, p. 87).
We see in Roberta's words here an example of the ways in which Terry's research and scholarship have been influential in inspiring other researchers, and particularly, in this case, extending to the needs of specific groups of students who might in other circumstances be disadvantaged.

Contributions to the field of mathematics education
Toward the end of her life, Terry moved house to live in Columbus, Ohio, close to her son and his family, and I was able to visit her there. Despite obvious weakness related to her illness, Terry retained her spark of enthusiasm for our field and entered freely into discussion on our work together as we walked very slowly around her block. Over the years from 1988, we had visited each other many times in the U.S. or the UK, staying in each other's houses, Terry's in Purdue and mine in Oxford (and later in Norway). Terry loved my dog and always wanted to take her for a walk. She took pictures when we went with my mother to visit an old abbey by a river in Yorkshire. Typical of Terry, she was as warm and friendly with my mother as with academic friends, and the dog loved her. When I visited Purdue, we went many times to Chicago and visited the Art Institute of which Terry was an avid member and her enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I came to look forward to those visits. On one occasion our visit coincided with the Chicago Jazz Festival, and I recall deep pleasure in sitting on the grass by the lake, listening to superb music with a backdrop of the skyline of Chicago and Terry as a companion.
When Terry died, I was invited by the editors of the journal Research in Mathematics Education (RME) to write an obituary for Terry. This I did with poignancy and pleasure. It was a welcome opportunity to celebrate Terry's contributions to Mathematics Education (Jaworski, 2010). I will draw on what I wrote there to recognize key areas of work in which we were both involved. First, a working group at PME: In 1990, at the PME conference in Mexico, Terry, Sandy Dawson and I initiated a working group entitled, Psychology of Inservice Education of Mathematics Teachers: a Research Perspective. Working with these two passionate mathematics educators was a great experience for me. We all cared fundamentally about the nature of mathematics teaching and ways in which teaching does and can develop. Our group ran from 1990 to 1994 inclusive. During this time many international colleagues joined us in our work, and although the membership of the group kept changing, we built up a range of understandings about teachers and teaching development. This resulted in a volume of papers (Jaworski, Wood and Dawson, 1999). A major recognition was that despite theoretical perspectives and visions of practice involving pedagogies in mathematics that take us beyond the 'traditional', the practice of actual classrooms lags far behind. This is despite, also, teachers' engagement in specially designed courses and their sincere efforts to engage the new pedagogies. In her own chapter, Terry writes as follows: "In this chapter, I argue for the necessity to develop, in our understanding of teaching, beyond the level of description and personal insight to create theoretical constructs of pedagogy. I argue that this can best be accomplished through a process that is grounded in findings from empirical data gathered in classrooms, to the formation of descriptive categories for the empirical work, to the generation of theoretical constructs in the formulations of teaching" (Wood, 1999, p. 163). (Jaworski, 2010, p. 176) Here we see a clear commitment to the classroom roots of theories in pedagogy, and the importance of working from what happens in classrooms rather than trying to impose onto it from above. I see, here, so many of the characteristics and qualities reflected in quotations above from the articles of this special issue. I continue with our work together for the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education: In 2002, a new editorial team took over from Tom Cooney to edit the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education (JMTE). The team included Terry and myself along with Konrad Krainer and Peter Sullivan and, a little later, Dina Tirosh. We were all highly committed to building up this journal based on the groundwork done by Tom and Heidi Weigel. In her first editorial for JMTE (Wood 2002), Terry wrote about "demand for complexity and sophistication: generating and sharing knowledge about teaching." The following words take further her theme quoted above: "The changes that are occurring in the view of what constitutes mathematics to be learned in school and the view of how learning takes place necessarily mean changes in teaching. This is obvious, but for the most part, the vision of teaching is drawn largely from theoretical and epistemological tenets of learning and sources of mathematical knowledge generalized to a hypothetical view of teaching, rather than a perspective grounded in the practice of teachers. For those of us interested in teacher education, this combination of factors has created a "devil of a problem" to put it politely, for the past decade." She writes further: "Only recently have alternate forms of teaching, developed by a cadre of professional teachers in response to the demand for change, become available. This allows us to understand better the complex interplay between the norms teachers establish with their students, the routine patterns of interaction, and students' mathematical thinking and reasoning in order to provide insights into what is meant by the phrase beyond classical pedagogy (emphasis in original)." (p. 176) We worked as Editors of JMTE for 6 years until 2008. During this time, our editorial team was invited to take on the editing of an International Handbook of Mathematics Education in four volumes. As there were five of us, we persuaded Terry to become Series Editor, with each of the other four of us editing just one of the volumes. It is worth noting that this was almost her last professional task (Wood et al., 2008). I know that she was proud to be able to offer this work to the international community.
My obituary for Terry included references and quotations from other work of Terry with colleagues in the U.S. I will leave it to readers to look this up if interested. One item referred to a book entitled Beyond Classical Pedagogy, written with Barbara Scott Nelson and Janet Warfield in 2001 (Wood et al., 2001). At the end of the preface, Terry writes, "And finally, to Robert and Christine, may the ideas about teaching portrayed in this book be another response to the question you asked in 1989." Intrigued by these references, I asked Robert and Christine what this had meant from their perspective. Rob replied as follows: In 1989, Christie and I were seniors in high school. We had attended two different school systems. The first school had an informal learning style to which I responded well. I remember learning that multiplication was a form of quick addition when, in 1st or 2nd grade, a friend of mine and I counted all the holes in a speaker grill for a phonograph player (there were nearly 100). The teacher saw what we were doing and showed us that we could count the number of ranks and number of files and multiply them for the same result. It was like a magic trick. We had to count all the holes several times before we believed that multiplication really worked like that. Some 30 years later, I have a vivid memory of that day. The second school was more oriented toward rote learning and force fed algorithms. I did not respond quite so well and remember an incident in 6th grade when we were asked to make a mobile of geometric shapes for math class. I thought the task was silly for our level. Without much effort, I completed the project. I hung traditional shapes, cut from plain white cardboard, on an ordinary wire coat hanger with bulky white thread. It looked horrid, but each shape was correctly labeled, "square," "circle," etc. My mobile received a "D" grade, just above failing. Another student made beautiful, paper mache, solid shapes and painted them bright colors. However, she labeled the sphere as a "circle," the cube as a "square," the pyramid as a "triangle," etc. She received an "A." These two examples illustrate, I think, what Mom thought was right about the best math instruction (rising from natural curiosity in the environment) and the worst (rote work, force fed algorithms, students who clearly were missing the meaning behind the math). In 1989 there was a lot of publicity about how poorly Americans did with math and how American boys, starting in middle school (around puberty), tended to be favored in math and science over American girls (this has since reversed, I understand). The latter caused a dearth of women exploring math and science in college and choosing professions that use math and science. All of these things: ineffective teaching of math, poorly performing students and a gender bias were of concern to Mom. Christie and I were the students. We felt these things first hand and were frustrated. And we asked her, "How did you let schools get this way anyway?" (personal communication) Rob's recall of examples from the classroom resonates strongly with much of my experience over the years, and I suspect also with that of many other mathematics educators. We have known many situations which would parallel those described and recognize the complexity of issues for the teachers and teaching. The articles of this special issue certainly support this supposition.

A Golden Braid
I have enjoyed writing this article, especially reading the earlier articles, and finding of extracts to support my conjecture that the metaphor of a Golden Braid could underpin the messages these articles revealed. I believe I can say without a doubt that Terry was an exceptional person -teacher, educator, mentor, researcher, colleague, and friend. Our experiences portrayed here provide ample evidence backed up by the "Memories of Terry" symposium (https://sites. google.com/view/tlwmemorialevent/home) and the obituary I wrote (Jaworski, 2010). "Golden" recognizes the deep, intense quality of our experiences of Terry. The braid we have woven here includes strands of theory, practice, mentoring, pedagogy, professionalism, challenge, collegiality, and friendship. I might add, Terry's qualities of wisdom, insight, intuition, warmth, care, and joy.
Having used Hofstadter's (1999) title, I felt obliged to explore his thinking in using a Golden Braid in the title for his book. He reports a review of the first edition of his book as offering a one-sentence summary of the contents: "A scientist argues that reality is a system of interconnected braids" to which Hofstadter replies "Hogwash" (p. 1). I am therefore reluctant to refer to Hofstadter's reasoning in my use of his title. Instead, I will refer to an experience I had recently of being invited by Professor Anne Birgit Fyhn to the far north of Norway to observe classroom mathematics teaching in a Sami primary school. In the first lesson, I was charmed by the use of many Sami artifacts to stimulate mathematical thinking and meanings. Many of the artifacts (e.g., table runners, caps and socks, shawls) were woven in bright colors, included braids. I was introduced to braiding, a complex process of many designs, and was proud to achieve some simple braids myself. However, I was struck by both the complexity of the braids and the skill of braiding in which they were produced by local people including children. The differing braids carried with them meanings for the Sami community, and indeed mathematical meanings related to the design of the braids. Papers by Anne Fhyn and colleagues describe the braiding processes and their mathematical analogies (e.g., Fyhn et al., 2017). I believe the work with Sami children was something Terry would have loved and appreciated.
I am careful not to make too linear a comparison here between the Sami braiding, styles and processes, and the content above. However, I think the metaphor is a valuable one. Braiding the various elements listed above (in 2s, 3s or more), can take us into many of the qualities that we authors of this special issue discerned in Terry Wood. The complexity of colorful braiding provides a metaphor for the complexity of Terry's many characteristics and ways in which we have all benefitted from them. I know that mathematics education lost a keen scholar, and one who was dedicated to promoting developments in mathematics teaching beyond classical pedagogy. In this special issue, we remember and honor Terry and feel honored to have known her.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.