Mathematical Relationships In Education: Identities and Participation

“The book represents an impressive attempt to get to the heart of mathematical relationships. The chapters are very much grounded in the realities of everyday concerns within mathematics education: selection and assessment; pedagogy; curriculum; choice; teacher development. Importantly, the authors avoid a sensationalized treatment of the issues under interrogation. In addition, they neither propose a highly theoretical nor an exclusively practical methods approach. Rather, the book constructs a dialogue between theory and empirical evidence across three theoretical lenses (sociocultural, discursive, and psychoanalytic), exposing the tensions amongst them. But the book goes further: it identifies points of settlement amongst the three approaches that might lead to new knowledge not only for research not also for policy and practice.”

-Margaret Walshaw, Massey University, New Zealand

“…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

Laura Black is a lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her research interests focus on pedagogic processes in the classroom and the construction of learner identities particularly in relation to mathematics. She is currently working on several projects on widening participation in mathematically demanding programmes within post compulsory education.

Heather Mendick is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her research, she works across education, gender studies, sociology and cultural studies and is particularly interested in influences of popular culture on identities and aspirations. She used to be a mathematics teacher.

Yvette Solomon is Professor of Education at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the nature of relationships between language, learning and mathematical knowledge, and between identity, participation and community experience. She is the author of The Practice of Mathematics, and of Mathematical Literacy, both published by Routledge.