Melissa Andrade-Molina

The Effects of School Geometry in the Shaping of a Desired Child

In this chapter we explore how school geometry becomes a technology for the government of the self, and how the pedagogical devices of school geometry conduct students’ ways of thinking and acting. We contend that students, in their working with pedagogical devices, engage in a training process in which they learn to regulate their own conduct so that they perceive space through the trained eyes of reason provided by Euclidean, school geometry. Our contribution is an analysis of the power effects of school geometry in terms of the fabrication of children’s subjectivities towards the shaping of the desired child of society.

Assessing Visualization: An analysis of Chilean teachers’ guidelines.

The aim of this paper is to describe how visualization should be assessed in schools as recommended by official curricular guidelines. We contend that researchers and policy makers have granted spatial abilities with the status of a key element to improve students’ mathematics performance. However, this importance seems to fade when developing curricular guidelines for assessing students while learning school mathematics and geometry. We conducted an analysis of the teacher’s official guidelines for the assessment of school mathematics in Chile. The analysis of two of those guides is considered in this paper. The results revealed that these guidelines do not provide sufficient guidance to teachers related to assessing visualization in schools; rather, their focus is on a culture of evaluation based on large-scale assessment techniques that leads to less emphasis on spatial abilities and more emphasis on calculation.

(D)effecting the Child: The scientifization of the self through school mathematics

world. Our assumption is that such a gap is not to be explained in terms of a “misimplementation” of the curricular intentions. Rather, the gap evidences elements of the power effects of school geometry on children’s subjectivities. Adopting cultural historical strategies to investigate this contention in the constitution of school geometry, the paper deploys an argument in three movements. Firstly, we examine how notions of space move between discussions of per(D)EFFECTING THE CHILD

The amalgam of faith and reason: Euclid’s Elements and the scientific thinker.

Problematizing the truths of mathematics education is one of the roles of the philosophy of mathematics education. That mathematics education is a matter of reason and science—not of faith and religion—and that mathematics is timeless, universal and immutable, objective knowledge that is independent from people’s work and sense-making are two strong taken-for-granted statements that navigate in common understandings of mathematics education. Using a Foucault-Deleuze inspired analytical strategy, we examine the contention that mathematics education for the making of the rational and logical child intertwines with what was ought to be the ‘scientific thinker’ to Christianity. We focus on how Euclidean geometry, taken as a proper method of inquiry amalgamated with the Christian worldview to provide explanations about the natural world. The effect of power is the making of the Modern scientific thinker.