While demand for the mathematically literate citizen increases, many learners continue to reject mathematics and experience it as excluding and exclusive, even when they succeed at it. In exploring this phenomenon, this volume examines the ways in which learners form particular relationships with mathematics in the context of formal schooling.
This book brings together scholars working in the field of mathematics education to examine the ways in which learners form particular relationships with mathematics in the context of formal schooling. While demand for the mathematically literate citizen increases, many learners continue to reject mathematics and experience it as excluding and exclusive, even when they succeed at it. In exploring this phenomenon, this volume focuses on learners' developing sense of self and their understanding of the part played by mathematics in it. It recognizes the part played by emotional responses, the functioning of classroom communities of practice, and by discourses of mathematics education in this process. It thus blends perspectives from psychoanalysis, socio-cultural theory and discursive approaches in a focus on the classic issues of selection and assessment, pedagogy, curriculum, choice, and teacher development.
"?the theoretical notions put to use in this book have the potential to be extremely powerful in unearthing the kinds of relationships that learners, across cultures and locations, might form with mathematics. The book is a timely intervention precisely because we are only now beginning to appreciate that issues to relating to learners' relationships with mathematics are among the most complex and challenging facing us today."--Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
"This book is the result of a seminar series entitled "Mathematical relationships: identities and participation" held in the UK some years ago. The six seminars brought together a number of researchers and practitioners working in the areas of mathematics education. A wide body of research indicates that mathematics can be made more accessible in classrooms which encourage exploration, negotiation, and ownership of knowledge and their corresponding identity shifts. Thus has implication for teacher development, but also requires recognition that teachers own mathematical identities."-Valentina Dagiene
