Abstract
In mathematics education, there is general agreement regarding the significance of mathematical literacy (also quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed citizenship, which often requires evaluating the use of numbers in public policy discourse. We hold that such an evaluation must accommodate the necessarily fragile relation between the information that numbers are taken to carry and the policy decisions they are meant to support. In doing so, attention needs to be paid to differences in how that relation is formed. With this in mind, we investigated a public discourse that heavily relied on numbers in the context of introducing, maintaining, and easing the rules and regulations directed to contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 during the first epidemic wave of COVID-19 in Germany with its peak in early April 2020. We used a public-service broadcasting outlet as data. Our theoretical stance is affiliated with post-structuralist discourse theory. As an outcome, we identified four major related strategies of using numbers, which we named rationalisation, contrast, association and recharging. In our view explicit attention to these strategies as well as identifying new ones can aid the task of furthering critical mathematical literacy.
Highlights
Background and aimsGoal statements of mathematics education routinely emphasise the significance of mathematical literacy for informed critical citizens
As to public discourses in which numbers feature prominently, important contributions furthering mathematical and statistical literacy concern identifying common pitfalls in interpretations of central concepts (e.g., Bakker et al, 2004; Pierce & Chick, 2013; Pratt et al, 2011; Van Dooren et al, 2003), scrutinising the process of measurement and modelling along with attention to what has been omitted in the quantification (e.g., Barbosa, 2006; Jablonka, 1997) as well as excavating the invisible mathematical models from which numbers are emitted into the public sphere (e.g., Gellert & Jablonka, 2007; Iceland, 2005; Keitel et al, 1993)
A critical evaluation of the use of numbers by political actors would be naïve, if it were confined to determining whether “numbers are used wrongly” and/or “the wrong numbers are used”. While this appears possible in familiar contexts by habit, or in the face of complex problems by agreement on scientific and moral standards for the construction and use of mathematical models and statistics, such a judgement reaches at all events beyond mathematical literacy conceived as a mathematical competence
Summary
Background and aimsGoal statements of mathematics education routinely emphasise the significance of mathematical literacy ( quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed critical citizens. Political dimensions of the use of numbers have been explicitly recognised in the tradition of critical mathematical and statistical literacy These concern both (i) unmasking of the apparent neutrality of depicting the social sphere by means of quantities, metrics or indicators, and (ii) analysing the selection and adaptation of numbers in the service of particular interests (e.g., Appelbaum & Davila, 2009; Brantlinger, 2014; Fish & Persaud, 2012; Frankenstein, 2008; Jablonka, 1997; Skovsmose, 1992; Weiland, 2017).
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