The Sociology Of Mathematics Education

Until the 1960s, maths was studied as an academic subject in a desire to have more mathematicians. The current trend, however, has moved away from viewing maths as a purely intellectual endeavour and towards developing a more mathematically competent workforce and citizenry. This trend has seen a large increase in the number of maths schemes being produced by the major educational publishers, which attempt to make maths easier and more approachable by using language instead of symbols. So why do so many children still fail at maths? The author contends that to understand this, teachers need to analyze and evaluate the maths textbooks they are currently using. The author shows the reader how to systematically analyze and evaluate these textbooks. This interrogation of classroom resources, should have important implications for teaching strategies and for textbook design and use.

This volume is a forward–looking intersection of Sociological perspectives on mathematics classrooms and socio-political perspectives on mathematics education. The first perspective has generated a substantial body of knowledge in the mathematics education. Interactionist research has deepened our understanding of interaction processes, socio-mathematical norms and the negotiation of meaning, generating a ‘micro-sociology’ or a ‘micro-ethnography’ of the mathematics classroom. More recently, socio-political perspectives on mathematics education interrelate educational practices in mathematics with macro-social issues of social equity, class, and race and with the policies that regulate institutionalized mathematics education. This book documents, strings together and juxtaposes research that uses ethnographical classroom data to explain, on the one hand, how socio-political issues play out in the mathematics class. On the other hand, it illuminates how class, race etc. affect the micro-sociology of the mathematics classroom. The volume advances the knowledge in the field by providing an empirical grounding of socio-political research on mathematics education, and it extends the frame in which mathematical classroom cultures are conceived.

Until the 1960s, maths was studied as an academic subject in a desire to have more mathematicians. The current trend, however, has moved away from viewing maths as a purely intellectual endeavour and towards developing a more mathematically competent workforce and citizenry. This trend has seen a large increase in the number of maths schemes being produced by the major educational publishers, which attempt to make maths easier and more approachable by using language instead of symbols. So why do so many children still fail at maths? The author contends that to understand this, teachers need to analyze and evaluate the maths textbooks they are currently using. The author shows the reader how to systematically analyze and evaluate these textbooks. This interrogation of classroom resources, should have important implications for teaching strategies and for textbook design and use.

In the eyes of the editors, this book will be considered a success if it can convince its readers of the following: that it is warranted to dream of a realistic and full-fledged theory of mathematical practices, in the plural. If such a theory is possible, it would mean that a number of presently existing fierce oppositions between philosophers, sociologists, educators, and other parties involved, are in fact illusory.

This book by-passes both psychology and sociology to present an original social theory centered on seeing mathematical learning by everyone as an intrinsic dimension of how mathematics develops as a field in support of human activity. Here, mathematics is defined by how we collectively talk about it. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the student is seen as participating in the renewal of mathematics through their contributions to our collective gaze on mathematics as the field responds to ever new demands. As such learning takes a critical stance on the standard initiations into current practices often promoted by formal education. In the field of mathematics education, researchers have moved from psychology where individual students were seen as following natural paths of development through existing mathematical knowledge, to socio-cultural models predicated on students being initiated into the human world and understood through the reflective gazes this world has of itself, such as those found in comparisons of student learning in different countries. This book addresses the domain, purpose and functioning of contemporary research in mathematics education and is an original contribution to this theme. The book is aimed at a mathematics education research audience. It continues a dialogue with existing publications, seen widely as a cutting edge and will also be of interest to students and practitioners in the fields of qualitative research, social theory and psychology.

Mathematics education research as a discipline is situated at the confluence of an array of diffuse‚ seemingly incommensurable‚ and radically divergent discourses. Research claims that have grown out of mathematics education are wide-ranging and antagonistic rather than circumscribed by hidebound disciplinary frames. While there has never been a unified‚ totalising discipline of knowledge labelled ‘mathematics education research’‚ and while it has always been a contested terrain‚ it is fair to say that the master paradigm out of which this field has been generated has been that of cognitive psychology. Mainstream mathematics education knowledges refracting the master discourse of psychology —whereby cognition serves as the central privileged and defining concept— clearly delimits its possibilities for serving as a social tool of democratic transformation. The central point of departure of this new collection is that mathematics education research is insufficiently univocal to support the type of uncompromising interpretation that cognitive psychologists would bring to it. The hallmark contribution of this pathbreaking volume edited by Paola Valero and Robyn Zevenbergen is the paradigmatic shift the authors have effected in the field of mathematics education research‚ taking up a position at the faultline of socio-cultural analysis and critical pedagogy.

An international group of distinguished scholars brings a variety of resources to bear on the major issues in the study and teaching of mathematics, and on the problem of understanding mathematics as a cultural and social phenomenon. All are guided by the notion that our understanding of mathematical knowledge must be grounded in and reflect the realities of mathematical practice. Chapters on the philosophy of mathematics illustrate the growing influence of a pragmatic view in a field traditionally dominated by platonic perspectives. In a section on mathematics, politics, and pedagogy, the emphasis is on politics and values in mathematics education. Issues addressed include gender and mathematics, applied mathematics and social concerns, and the reflective and dialogical nature of mathematical knowledge. The concluding section deals with the history and sociology of mathematics, and with mathematics and social change. Contributors include Philip J. Davis, Helga Jungwirth, Nel Noddings, Yehuda Rav, Michael D. Resnik, Ole Skovsmose, and Thomas Tymoczko.

Research within a socio-political paradigm or “turn” has been gradually recognized and institutionalized as an important part of mathematics education. This book focuses on the neglected problems, tensions and contradictions evoked by this process. The authors do this by challenging current regimes of truth about mathematics education; by identifying how recent technological developments challenge or suspend contemporary conceptions of mathematics education; by critiquing the ideological entanglement of mathematics, its education and schooling with capitalism; by self-reflective analyses of researchers' impacts on shaping what is and can be perceived as the practice of mathematics education (research); and by confronting main-stream mathematics education with socio-political contexts that are usually neglected. In this way, "mathematical rationality" becomes contextualized within contemporary society, where it reproduces itself through technologies, social practices, media and other spheres of social life.