Alexandre Pais

A Critical Approach to Equity

Equity has been on the agenda of mathematics education research for at least two decades. The (first) Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (Grouws, 1992) contains two chapters dealing with issues of equity and access: one focusing on gender (Leder, 1992), and the other on race, ethnicity, social class, and language (Secada, 1992). In 1995, a collection of pioneering contributions concerning the research on equity within mathematics education was published (edited by Secada, Fennema, and Adajian). In the same year, Rogers and Kaiser (1995) edited a book compiling research on the relation between equity and gender.

Beyond Disavowing the Politics of Equity and Quality in Mathematics Education

It is widely recognized in mathematics education research that issues of social justice, democracy, inclusion or diversity are political in nature and extend beyond mathematics education. However, the great majority of mathematics education research lacks a theoretical understanding of how the problems it tries to solve are related with broader social and political structures in society. In this chapter, we will make a contribution to this understanding, by analyzing how social discourses and forms of ideology permeate the way mathematics education research engages with the issues of equity and quality. We base our reflections on theoretical tools drawn from the philosophy of Gert Biesta and Slavoj Žižek. Our argument is that exclusion and inequity within mathematics education and education in general are integral parts of current school education and cannot be conceptualized without understanding the relation between school education and capitalism as the dominant mode of social living.

Learning to fail and learning from failure – ideology at work in a mathematics classroom

When actualised in a concrete school, the official discourse of inclusion and equity often encounters a series of obstacles that research strives to identify and address under the imperative to eliminate them. Through the exploration of classroom episodes, teacher interviews and field notes from a German secondary school, we take failure not as a correctable obstacle but as a symptom of the ideology at work in current educational practices. Symptoms, as Žižek (after Lacan) suggested, cannot be eliminated but always (re)emerge since they concern the impossibility of official discourses actualising themselves. We thus argue for a research agenda that learns from failure instead of research concerned with the possible successes that might prospectively be brought into existence, if just the ‘right’ theory was applied ‘correctly’.

The Narcissism of Mathematics Education

Why does mathematics education research create a reality so at odds with the one experienced by the vast majority of teachers and students worldwide? This chapter is part of an ongoing venture that seeks to analyse the ideological belongings of contemporary educational research, by focusing in the particular case of mathematics education. Here, the author displays some elements of Pfaller’s materialist approach to philosophy and Žižek’s ideology critique to analyse common shared assumptions of researchers when conceiving the influence of their work in practice. It is argued that mathematics education research needs to shift its perspective and recognise in its symptoms—students’ systematic failure, absence of change, increasing of testing, pernicious political and economic influences, etc.—the violent expression of the disavowed part of itself.

An ideology critique of global citizenship education

ABSTRACT In the last two decades, global citizenship education (GCE) has become a catchphrase used by international and national educational agencies, as well as researchers, to delineate the increasing internationalisation of education, framed as an answer to the growing globalisation and the high values of citizenship. These developments, however, have created issues, due to the presence of two conflicting discourses. While the discourse of critical democracy highlights the importance of ethical values, social responsibility and active citizenry, a neoliberal discourse privileges instead a market-rationale, focused on self-investment and enhanced profits. These two discourses are not separated; they rather appear side by side, causing a confusing effect. This article aims to analyse GCE as an ideology, unveiling not only its hidden (discursive) content but also the role played by non-discursive elements in guaranteeing the coexistence of antagonistic discourses. It will be argued that not only the critical democratic discourse does not offer any resistance or threat to the neoliberal structuring of higher education, but also this discourse can function as an apologetic narrative that exculpates all of us who still want to work in universities, notwithstanding our dissatisfaction with their current commodification.

Welcome to the Jungle. An Orientation Guide to the Disorder of Mathematics Education

This introductory chapter builds on the assumption that the sociopolitical dimensions of mathematics education have been gradually recognised as an important part of mathematics education research. We problematise the process of institutionalising these dimensions as a firm strand of mathematics education research just as “philosophy of mathematics (education)”, “history of mathematics (education)”, “modelling and applications” or “geometry”. This leads us to identify and conceptualise “disorder” as the foundation of the sociopolitical dimensions and accordingly to propose a shift from focussing diversity towards focussing disorder. Finally, we illustrate how the chapters of this book contribute to such an alternative self-conception of sociopolitical research in mathematics education.

Truth, Power and Capitalist Accumulation in Mathematics Education

In this chapter I raise a set of questions intended to make us reflect on our work as researchers, namely in the way we propagate and naturalise common assumptions or truths about mathematics education, as well as the mechanisms of power that makes it difficult for us to see beyond these well-accepted truths. I suggest that some of the forces that impact upon and restrict socially just outcomes for mathematics education are not just “external”, that is, originated outside the mathematics education community, but also, and perhaps more importantly for us, from the way research itself addresses the teaching and learning of mathematics in schools. Instead of positing ourselves as the beautiful souls of mathematics education, my invitation is for us to posit ourselves as part of the problem, and be willing to address some of our ideological assumptions before relegating to the social and political world the causes of our discontentment. For this purpose, I will rely on Foucault’s and Lacan’s works on the notion of truth, as a way to explore the role that contemporary mathematics education plays within capitalism.

Non-Formal Spaces of Socio-Cultural Accompaniment: Responding to Young Unaccompanied Refugees--Reflections from the "Partispace" Project.

Drawing on research in progress in the Partispace project we make a case for the recognition of the importance of non-formal spaces in response to young refugees across three different national contexts: Frankfurt in Germany; Gothenburg in Sweden; and Manchester in the UK. It is argued that recognition of local regulation and national controls of immigration which support climates of hostility makes it important to recognise and affirm the significance of non-formal spaces and ‘small spaces close to home’ which are often developed in the ‘third space’ of civil society and arise from the impulses driven by the solidarity of volunteers. In these contexts it is important that practices of hospitality can develop which symbolically reconstitute refugees as hosts and subjects of a democratic conversation, without which there is no possible administrative solution to the refugee crisis. It is essential that educational spaces such as schools, colleges and universities forge strong bonds with such emergent spaces.

Science and Technology Studies × Educational Studies: Critical and Creative Perspectives on the Future of STEM Education

This special issue presents a collection of articles that multiplies Science and Technology Studies (STS) with Educational Studies, in an attempt to think differently about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. We hope this cross product of the two fields amplifies the philosophical insights from each, stretching scholarship in new directions and across disciplines. While diligently refusing reductive scientisms, we open up this manifold space so as to cultivate discussions of a possible rapprochement between the physical and social sciences (Wilson, 2015). This work responds to the changing theoretical landscape across the humanities or posthumanities, following the ontological turn and the shift to consider more-than-human agencies. This work is thus highly relevant for the field of educational studies and the social foundations of education, providing insights into alternative onto-epistemologies, and tracking the impact of these across education policy, research, and curriculum. As part of the shifting theoretical terrain, we see philosophers today exploring newmixtures of politics and nature by looking to mathematics (Badiou, 2011; Kirby, 2011; Meillassoux, 2010), the physical sciences (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Coole&Frost, 2010; DeLanda, 2011, 2015) as well as indigenous cosmologies (Avelar, 2013; Chakrabarty, 2009, 2014; Danowski & Viveiros