Peter Appelbaum

Science! Fun? A critical analysis of design/content/evaluation

School science discourse is analysed through professional research literature, curriculum materials, professional development materials, and popular and mass culture science materials, including the world-wide-web. The crucial role of fun is used as a node through which to understand how school science practice is intimately connected with theories of motivation so that school science practice can be interpreted as a technology of power. Web pages and television programmes are analysed as extreme cases of the application of this discourse, revealing an overarching representation of science curriculum. Alternative directions for classroom practice are suggested.

Disordered Order, Ordered Disorder: Threads, Folds, and Artistic Action

Alterglobal social movements and psychoanalysis are mined for actionable transformation of the mathematics educator, shifting the scholar of mathematics education, and offering phases for changing oneself in order to change the world: Identify (Deleuzian) nomadic terms; use these terms in nontraditional ways; craft the work with the new, nomadic topology; and study the points of time/space simultaneity within the new topology. Mathematics as public art is used to illustrate these phases. Alterglobal discourses act as tools of psychoanalytic understanding, functioning as hinges across the apolitical and the political, making mathematics education a part of changing social reality.

How to Be a Political Social Change Mathematics Education Activist

Three sets of nomadic epistemological categories (Deleuze and Guattari) that coexist with other theoretical frameworks of mathematics education discourse and practice are used to suggest an approach to changing ourselves as mathematics educators through the ways that we think and act. The argument is that these reconceptualizing processes can change our worlds of possibility for mathematics education while allowing coexistence with more mainstream programs of research and practice: Arendt’s work, labor and action; Pitt’s youth leadership, voice and participation; and McElheny’s architectural, scientific, and artistic models. Such epistemological categories establish topologies, reconstructing subjectivities in the process—a tactic of alterglobal social movements that potentially politicize mathematics education: we change ourselves to change the world. Psychoanalytic responses to the terror of change, and the need to address the legacies of mathematics as a component of colonialism, are considered as components of broader social change.

Service-Learning as Teacher Education

This research is based on four different service learning projects bringing together secondary students with future and current teachers for a once-weekly four-month after-school “intergenerational math circle”. Each group took on its own unique character with its own particular types of activities and goals, self-defined by the group participants. The chapter discusses service-learning as teacher education focusing on the changing role of assessment, on the ethics of service learning and on the horizon it may provide for future teachers.

The Curricular Geometries of *SAMBA* Schools: Fractal Dimensions, Surface, Depth, and Recursion

A collaboration between academics and a community arts group leads to a new geometry of curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation. The new concepts are fractal dimension, surface, depth, and recursion. Interweaving interdisciplinary curriculum and taking action projects, in and out of school, looks like recursive fractals where the surface contains its own depth when interpreted in terms of Euclidean geometry. Important characteristics include dimensional flow (the changing dimensionality in fractal space time) and the ease of recognizing the depth of hegemonic commonsense.

Resounding Education: Sonic Instigations, Reverberating Foundations

The purpose of this special issue is to demonstrate the depth and breadth of the ways that sound considerations can significantly contribute to the field of Educational Foundations. An interdisciplinary and international field, Sound Studies has tackled subfields and themes familiar to those who work in educational foundations. For example, there has been work on sound histories, sound philosophies, sound culture, sound/race, and sound methodologies. As noted in a recent article in the twentieth anniversary issue of Qualitative Inquiry, there has also been a burgeoning attention to sound scholarship in education. Not dissimilar to a similar move made in curriculum studies, contributors to this issue will attend to and otherwise explore sound possibilities for educational theory, policy and practice. To these ends contributors will interrupt both everyday, commonsense understandings and longstanding theoretical foundations that tend to be predicated on the ocular. This special issue is open to the many forms for documenting contradictions and trends, theoretical elaboration, empirical scholarship, and methodological innovation with and through sound concepts and tools.

Learning and Technology? Technology and Learning? A Commentary

Should we or can we understand learning better by working with technology, and then better support learning through technology? Research that compares learning with “low-tech” technologies (paper and pencil, models and metaphors) with learning with “high-tech” technologies (calculators, dynamic software environments, touch-interactive devices) promises contributions to this question. This commentary argues that learning uses technology while technology uses learning, as demonstrated by the studies in this section of Sourcebook. Researchers in these chapters resist a common tendency to conceive of technology outside of humanity, and in this way offer models of richly informed by the co-construction of humans and their technologies.

Commentary: Semiotic Game, Semiotic Resources, Liminal Space—A Revolutionary Moment in Mathematics Education!

The commentary on the chapters of Gerofsky, of Bazzini and Sabena and of Gana and Stathopoulou emphasises the importance of transforming the relationship between people and mathematics education. It synthesises the three chapters by pointing to semiotic perspectives as crucial to our understanding of mathematics education practices and research.

A Game and a Dare

It’s a lost cause. Don’t even try. And by this I mean, celebrate! Yippee! There was a time not too long ago when educators believed that their job was to help learners make sense of things – to make sense of their world, to make sense of mathematics and language, static electricity and genocide, how to string a longbow, or how to sew just the right number of pleats in a skirt.