Copyright

Melissa Andrade-Molina; Alex Montecino;

Published On

2024-12-11

Page Range

pp. 539–568

Language

  • English

Print Length

30 pages

20. Societal perceptions of mathematics and mathematics education

Chapter of: Breaking Images: Iconoclastic Analyses of Mathematics and its Education(pp. 539–568)
That ‘people are naturally bad at mathematics’ or that ‘mathematics is reserved only for people with higher intellect’ are naturalised discourses rooted in the image and belief about mathematics and mathematics education. This chapter focuses on mapping societal perceptions of mathematics and mathematics education. These perceptions are tracked within naturalised discourses circulating on social networks, such as YouTube and Twitter, and in the media, such as newspapers and TV shows. We unpack the ways of thinking and understanding mathematics and mathematics education in peoples’ comments based on their daily experiences as humans navigating modern society and news websites that have published articles related to mathematics and mathematics education in order to map and take a critical position on societal perceptions circulating about mathematics and mathematics education among the public.

Contributors

Melissa Andrade-Molina

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1535-3194

Melissa Andrade-Molina is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile. Her main research interests are new-materialist perspectives of education. Her scholarship has been aimed at troubling the dominant narratives of schooling to explore how, historically, the curriculum has had (d)effects of power in the production of scientific subjectivities. Currently, she is interested in how diversity in schools has been positioned as a threat to economic growth, the emergence of the class/room, the reliability of correlations to fabricate kinds of human and tracing ethico-onto-epistemic violences produced by schooling and school mathematics.

Alex Montecino Muñoz

(author)
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at University of Tarapacá
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2412-8290

Alex Montecino is an assistant professor of mathematics education at the Universidad de Tarapacá in Chile. His research focuses on the sociopolitical turn. Much of his work critically questions the dominant discourses surrounding mathematics teachers. Furthermore, his research problematises the construction of the ‘ideal’ subject and how this normalises certain ways of being and acting. He also explores the production and reproduction of knowledge, particularly by examining the boundaries of what is considered possible and impossible to think and do within academia.