Copyright

Lisa Björklund Boistrup; Paola Valero;

Published On

2024-12-11

Page Range

pp. 373–404

Language

  • English

Print Length

32 pages

15. Networks, controversies, and the political in mathematics education research

Chapter of: Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education(pp. 373–404)
The stories about what constitutes the field of mathematics education research are threaded in a network of institutions, people, and materialities that both produce and sustain them. In such distributed network, controversies concerning these stories are constantly negotiated. Drawing on Latourian concepts and analytical strategies, such stories, network and controversies are explored in an attempt of understanding the political in mathematics education as a ‘matter of concern’. An analysis is deployed of the contemporary controversy on the justification for school mathematics in the school curriculum as it is played out in research that engages with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD)’s Program for International Student Assessment ( PISA) as an event shaping the political reasoning about mathematics education. Using the format of a play, the results show the positions entangled in the controversy surrounding mathematics education in current societies. Casting light to these controversies helps trace the multiple entanglements between mathematics education and the cultural politics and economy of our times.

Contributors

Lisa Björklund Boistrup

(author)
Full Professor of Mathematics Education at Malmö University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5671-6428

Lisa Björklund Boistrup is a full professor of mathematics education at Malmö University, Sweden. Her research has an interest in power relations within the research field of mathematics education, as well as part of mathematics education in lower and secondary school. Focuses here are on epistemic aspects, (in)formal assessment and sustainable digitalisation.

Paola Valero

(author)
Full Professor of Mathematics Education at Stockholm University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5736-7562

Paola Valero is a full professor of mathematics education at Stockholm University, Sweden. She researches the cultural politics of mathematics education to understand the significance of the mathematical qualifications for the fabrication of citizens in different times and spaces. The notion of mathematical subjectivation is central to her current research on mathematics and climate changes, and the material-discursive configuration of students’ mathematical identities in higher education.