During the recent Ontario general election, the victorious Progressive Conservative party made mathematics education a feature of its platform. The Toronto Sun ran a front-page headline during the campaign that captured Progressive Conservative Party leader Doug Ford's position: 'BACK TO BASICS'. While the Conservative Party proposals were not especially detailed, nor the campaign message particularly nuanced, the newspaper headline is certainly succinct and simplistic. What is interesting about it, however, is that it indexes a well-established discourse in news reporting and public debate about mathematics teaching and curriculum. The headline writer did not feel it necessary to elaborate or even mention mathematics directly. The expression 'back to basics' seems to address mathematics education directly and there is a clear assumption that readers will understand what 'basics' refers to. As mathematics educators, we are likely to find talk of 'basics' anathema, not because we are somehow against children learning 'basic' mathematics (whatever that might be), but rather because we also key into the discourse indexed by the headline. Many of us are concerned that 'back to basics' means a return to rote memorisation, drill and kill, fear and loathing of mathematics among school children, and a poor grasp of concepts, connections and the rich complexity of the subject. This example serves to illustrate some broader questions about the treatment of mathematics education in news media and the role of mathematics education in interpreting media reporting. What discourses are apparent in news coverage about mathematics education? How does the medium shape the message? How do consumers of news media interpret these discourses? How do these discourses construct mathematics education, mathematics curriculum, teachers, students and so on? How are prevailing discourses linked to broader political ideologies? These questions matter, because news reporting matters. News reporting shapes public opinion and popular thinking, including about mathematics education. News reporting also reflects public opinion and popular thinking. There is a reflexive relationship between the two. In a time of fake news, social media, click bait and rapid news cycles, in which news reporting must compete with other sources of information, opinion and outrage, it is important to pay attention to the discourses that are made available to the public about mathematics education. Both news media discourse and public opinion involve interactions of
What are the effects of teaching the dominant mathematics on the wholeness and integrity of the cultural, social and linguistic resources of diverse communities? In this text, I seek to capture the risks associated with utilising non-Western resources in the teaching of the dominant mathematics in order to elucidate possible types of harms that conventional mathematics education could cause to various non-Western communities. In particular, I challenge various dominant theoretical views that endorse the employment of the social, cultural and linguistic (re)sources of others to teach and learn mathematics, without paying similar or even deeper ethical attention to the mutual and reciprocal effects of the taught and learnt mathematics. I propose an epistemology of interrelationships; I call attention to possible harms caused by utilising the social, cultural and linguistic (re)sources of some non-Western communities as part of the teaching and learning of dominant school mathematics on the same (re)sources of those communities.
While there are several studies analysing how mathematics education is portrayed in news media discourses, there has been little examination of the construction of different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, curricula). In this paper, we report our analysis of a corpus of Canadian newspaper reports on mathematics education, focusing on the underlying construction of different stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth, we show how news media construct a “truth” that portrays different stakeholders as either actors or acted-ons working for or against individual or national mathematical performance. We explain these findings with reference to the general media framing of mathematics education in the corpus.
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