Mathematical Morality Tales: Mathematics Education in Canadian Newspapers

Abstract

Media reporting about mathematics education includes descriptions of different aspects of mathematics teaching, learning, curriculum and policies. As with any media reporting, such descriptions are not neutral. They reflect on and portray specific discourses and agendas about mathematics education, with quotations or experiences of different stakeholders such as parents, students and teachers. Using the concept of morality framing, in this paper, we examined the implicit moral dimension of such reporting. We analysed news content of a corpus of news articles on mathematics education published from September 2013 to March 2014, in three Canadian national English-language print publications. We found that the narratives and storylines depicted in these articles carry a particular set of moral values and a particular idea about the teaching, learning and assessment of mathematics in Canadian schools. In particular, we noticed that moral values attached to the ‘discovery’ method are negative and relate to the mathematical well-being of students and the nation as a whole. The moral values ascribed to the ‘back-to-basics’ method of teaching mathematics are predominantly positive, and are related to future prosperity.