Critical Mathematics Education Research Articles

). Literatura y educación estadística crítica para el abordaje de problemas sociales en el aula: una propuesta innovadora en estudiantes de educación media

This article addresses the importance of critical mathematical and statistical education in the development of competent citizens today. It emphasizes that statistical education involves not only teaching algorithms for data analysis in fictitious data samples but also the development of students' abilities to interpret and question the data presented in society. The main tool used is literary resources as the primary source of data and the context for the studies conducted. The study's primary tool is the book "Por qué los matan” by Ariel Ávila, aimed at 11th-grade students in Bogotá, Colombia. The book provides a critical and data-based perspective on violence and the murder of social leaders in Colombia, where statistical data are not isolated entities but tools that help understand and address complex issues in society.

Bringing Critical Mathematics Education and Actor–Network Theory to a Statistics Course in Mathematics Teacher Education: Actants for Articulating Complexity in Student Teachers’ Foregrounds

In this paper, we discuss how critical mathematics education (CME) and actor–network theory (ANT) come together in a mathematics teacher education course that focuses on the thematic context of climate change to study statistics. Acknowledging the complexity that student teachers encounter when asked to move from a mainly instrumental treatment of statistics toward a critical foreground of data in society, we turn to explore the actant networks, as theorized by ANT, utilized by student teachers when asked to imagine teaching from a CME perspective. For this, our study is based on a series of interviews with student teachers who participated in a statistics course where pollution data graphs were discussed, inquiring about their role as future critical mathematics teachers. The transcribed interviews, analyzed through ANT, inform us as to how student teachers’ foregrounds are being shaped by actants such as the curriculum, social justice, democracy, and source critique, among others. Based on the above, we recommend that teacher education should invite active discussion of the complexity created when a CME perspective is required. This move would allow for a critical approach to critical mathematics education itself that could prepare student teachers to navigate, instead of ignoring or opposing, such complexity.

Contributions of the Theory of the Inclusion of the Other to Inclusive Mathematics Education

Background: The post-colonial and anti-colonial theories in mathematics education, difference and inclusion led Souza and Skovsmose to create the term deficiencialism. Objective: To present the potential of Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the inclusion of the other to contribute to concepts of inclusive mathematics education. Design: Considering that Habermas is a German philosopher who defends ethical communication to solve social problems, we believe that his concepts can help understand the idea of inclusion in teaching to guide the academic community towards a better understanding and positioning about who the Other is. Setting and participants: Jurgen Habermas (2018, 2019) and Ole Skovsmose (2014). Data collection and analysis: Bibliographical and theoretical study. Results: We found possible similarities between Habermasian theories and the critical mathematics education by Ole Skovsmose, each concept with its particularities converging on ethical communication that can favour a more inclusive mathematics education.

Book review: A life in critical mathematics education. Ole Skovsmose (2023) Critical Mathematics Education. Springer

Book review: A life in critical mathematics education. Ole Skovsmose (2023) Critical Mathematics Education. Springer

Teacher Learning towards Equitable Mathematics Classrooms: Reframing Problems of Practice

This study responds to the debate on understanding and evaluating teacher learning in professional development programmes, with particular reference to the development of equitable mathematics classrooms. Conducted in the context of a year-long PD mathematics programme for primary teachers in Norway, designed to disrupt teachers’ assumptions about mathematics pedagogy and how it relates to students’ mathematical thinking, this study takes teachers’ entry goals as its point of departure. Sixteen teachers participated in interviews at the end of the course. Recognising the situated nature of the development of pedagogic judgement in our analysis of teachers’ reflections on their learning, we report on the shift in their “problems of practice” towards actionable concerns about student inclusion. We argue that this shift underpins a fundamental change in their assumptions about teaching and learning and a critical stance towards their own professional practice, suggesting an important indicator of what constitutes sustainable professional development for critical mathematics education.

Remote teaching in the Mathematics degree course at the Federal University of Acre: perspectives, difficulties and future possibilities

This research aimed to identify potentialities and protect from remote moments between professors and students of the Mathematics Degree Course at the Federal University of Acre during the pandemic moment, as well as actions that can be worked on by the subjects for a “next” post-pandemic. As methodological resources and source of information, teachers and students were consulted through an intuitive command to identify difficulties/concerns and possibilities with respect to development actions in the period called Emergency Remote. This investigation was qualitative in nature, as I understand that I deepened the understanding of the social group in question and its trajectory does not require quantification. The information was processed in the light of the Philosophy of Mathematics Education, Critical Mathematics Education and Digital Technologies in Mathematics Education. The quality of the students' internet and the possibilities for evaluating students by teachers represented the greatest difficulties encountered during the pandemic. representaram as maiores dificuldades encontradas no momento pandêmico.

The Fascists Are Coming! Teacher Education for When Right-Wing Activism Micro-Governs Classroom Practice

U.S. educational reform is often the harbinger of global demands on mathematics education practices globally. It behooves teacher education to ‘catch up’ on current trends, hopefully, to stave off the worst of the fascist tendencies of contemporary politics of education. Past foci on research-based ‘best practices’ and ‘mathematics for all’, grounded in liberal multiculturalism (confirming expectations from critical mathematics education scholarship), have become the targets of activists and politicians, turning once-exemplary teachers and their students into casualties. The four phases of currere are employed to study this phenomenon and to identify strategies and tactics for teacher education programs. The currere methodology indicates that the content of such programs must reduce time devoted to evidence and research-based practice in order to accommodate techniques and knowledge bases for the recognition of right-wing tactics, clowning, slogan parody, and political organizing. Teacher education must further place mathematics teachers’ embrace of expertise, authority, and neutrality within broader perspectives on the politics of education, organizational infrastructure strategies and tactics, resource curation, and personal safety planning. Teacher educators themselves must prepare responses to threats on their careers, lives, and families, and proactive ‘game plans’ for the development of new program curricula.

Students’ perspectives on Critical Mathematics Education

Theoretically, critical mathematics education (CME) differs markedly from traditional, teacher-centered mathematics teaching approaches. In addition to meeting mathematical goals, a main focus of CME lies on fostering students’ critical consciousness and positioning them as active and informed actors in the classroom and beyond. However, only few empirical studies explicitly focus on how students experience CME instruction and curriculum. In this contribution, we draw on interview data to examine how K-12 students in one Austrian and one American school setting respond to and perceive CME lessons. The analysis revealed that, within both classroom settings, students’ perceptions vary greatly, with some perceiving CME lessons as being completely different from prior experiences in school mathematics to some seeing little-to-no difference. Additionally features of CME instruction that mathematics teachers and researchers might consider to be the most salient are not necessarily the ones that students report attending to. Reasons for that might be manifold, and students might need more time with CME instruction and especially with reflecting on such lessons to identify the rationale behind the instructional approach. Moreover, researchers should be aware that students might not share their understanding of critical instructional reforms and might have diverse or even divergent perceptions.

Experiencing Critical Mathematics Education

When students ponder why they consider it relevant to learn math it becomes apparent that their attributions of relevance do not meet what educational policies state as goals. While they generally consider the subject to be important, their explanations why they do so are limited to only elementary mathematical skills needed in everyday life or unspecified skills for later work life, rarely connecting them to broader societal topics. Integrating Critical Mathematics Education (CME) tasks into math lessons might be a chance to let attributions of relevance evolve further. This contribution shows in how far the students’ perspectives on the relevance of math changed after they experienced several CME units. 16 students from three different schools have participated in two rounds of interviews where they have been asked about their image of math and math learning and if and what they consider relevant. Within the second round of interviews, after they experienced several CME units, additional questions about their experiences in these lessons have been added. The analysis shows that students’ general attribution of relevance did not change considerably. However, effects could be identified in their reflections about the CME units. Students talked about how these units let them experience a connection between math and societal topics that leads to a more personal and direct relevance of math for their lives. However, their understanding of what counts as doing math might hinder them to easily transfer their experiences within these units to their general attributions of relevance of math. If teachers regularly include CME tasks into their math lessons and make reflections on what mathematical activities have been applied to make sense of them an integral part of instruction, CME seems to offer the opportunity for students to broaden their conceptions of math and experience connections between math and societal topics more clearly.

Mathematics and Society: Towards Critical Mathematics Research and Education

Mathematics and Society: Towards Critical Mathematics Research and Education

The role of mathematics teacher educators in preparing teachers of mathematics to respond to global challenges within their classrooms

The world is in a period of rapid change. Climate chaos is leading to floods, droughts and exacerbating inequality. In this article, we ask, in such a context, what is the role of mathematics education and, in particular, what can mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) do in supporting teachers to respond to global challenges, and the associated injustices, within their mathematics classrooms? We review work done within critical mathematics education and develop a model for reflection on the role of the MTE. We report on work taking place in one university in the UK where, since 2015, MTEs have been encouraging teachers to address global issues in their classrooms. One role which has emerged for an MTE is in supporting the translation of scientific work on climate change into classroom tasks. In England, the spaces for such work are being squeezed in an education system increasingly subject to conservative political forces. We conclude the article by considering possibilities for MTEs to provoke a generic questioning of assumptions, which we argue is possible even within such constraints.

Mathematical Modeling in the perspective of Critical Mathematics Education and Rural Education: a few approaches

Resumo Este artigo traz resultados de uma pesquisa de mestrado e objetiva apresentar aproximações entre a Modelagem Matemática (MM) na perspectiva da Educação Matemática Crítica (EMC) e a Educação do Campo evidenciadas durante o desenvolvimento de atividades de MM em uma turma do 3° ano do Ensino Médio de uma Escola do Campo do interior do Paraná. Para isso, foi realizada uma pesquisa de natureza qualitativa, a partir do desenvolvimento de duas atividades de MM, conduzidas pelos casos 2 e 3 indicados por Barbosa (2004). Os dados foram coletados remotamente via internet por meio de observação, registrados utilizando ferramentas online e analisados de acordo com a Análise Textual Discursiva de Moraes e Galiazzi (2011). Os resultados apontam que a MM na perspectiva da EMC possibilitou fazer conexões com a Educação do Campo, uma vez que emergiram, por meio do diálogo, discussões democráticas e reflexões críticas a respeito de questões econômicas, ambientais, culturais e sociais, despertando a autonomia durante o desenvolvimento das atividades, cujos temas envolveram situações reais articuladas ao contexto e aos conhecimentos dos alunos.

Pedagogy for the Future in the Context of Nepal: An Exploration with Critical Mathematics Education

Critical mathematics education undermines the neutrality of mathematics teaching and learning; it confronts societal barriers and suppression, social justice, and opens up new pathways for students to participate in social and political life. This paper intends to analyze critical mathematics education and how it can be used as a tool to create a bright future for mathematics in Nepal by altering teaching pedagogy and applying it to practice. For this study, the search engine Google, Google scholar, Eric, and ProQuest were used. Three major themes were explored: thoughts of teachers towards critical mathematics education, mathematics education in relation to society, and technology-based teaching. To discuss the result content analysis on the themes were used. This study finds that optimistic attitude, innovation of teachers, and the use of critical pedagogy appear to be too responsible for the bright future of mathematics. To attain the objectives, our teachers must be enthusiastic, knowledgeable about information and technology, and critical and reflective.

Critical Mathematics Education: A Dialogic Approach to Mathematics Education

Critical Mathematics Education: A Dialogic Approach to Mathematics Education

Mathematics learning and the students' reality in the context of rice farming

The paper presents the planning and implementation of a classroom practice, with the aim of analyzing the articulation of students' reality and the learning process in mathematics. The students' reality considered refers to a municipality in which rice farming predominates and there is also a project to implement an environmental protection park. The study has a qualitative approach, and analyzes the classroom process and the data derived from it. The central theoretical contribution is based on Critical Mathematics Education, both in practice planning and in data analysis. The results indicate the importance of considering the reality of students in the classroom by allowing an attribution of meaning to the mathematical concepts covered, by allowing a reading of reality based on mathematical interpretation, and by allowing reflections on reality by articulating the background and foreground from the students.

Concerns of Critical Mathematics Education – and of Ethnomathematics

Critical mathematics education can be characterized by its many concerns. I refer here to four of them connected to social justice and politics, power and mathematics, students’ future possibilities, and the socio-political structuring of education, all of which are interrelated and integrated. Those concerns are shared by much work done in ethnomathematics. However, to what extent an ethnomathematical study turns critical must be discussed in every case. I see the concerns of critical mathematics education as an important challenge to ethnomathematics.

A Tool for Reflecting on Questionable Numbers in Society

The increased distribution of fake news on internet and social media raises concerns for democratic processes. Sometimes, argumentation in deceptive information is built on numbers, which gives reason to include mathematics when working with fake news in education. In this paper, I suggest a tool to facilitate students’ critical thinking related to numbers, or other mathematical representations, presented in the media. It may not be straight forward, or even possible, to judge the validity of presented numbers, or whether numbers are used with the intention to deceive. Complex topics are associated with uncertainty, which implies that numbers may be questionable without hidden intentions, and that evaluating a number’s relevance may be quite challenging. The developed tool consists of a set of questions to help reflecting on the validity of numbers, which again is developed into categories reflecting degrees of validity and whether the mathematical representation has a deceptive role. The categories are illustrated with examples from the media and from a classroom situation in teacher education to indicate how the tool can help raise critical questions. The developed categories are based on academic literature on fake news, typographies of uncertainty and on critical mathematics education.

Intersectional feminism to reenvision mathematical literacies & precarity

ABSTRACT Current global crises (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic and climate change) necessitate changes to mathematics curricula, especially related to using mathematics to solve real-world problems. We begin with the Programme for International Student Assessment's (PISA) framework for mathematical literacy (FML), since it functions as a global guide for curriculum. We demonstrate its inadequacy to solve current crises and to mediate the precarity of girls and women. Then we reenvision the FML by integrating concepts of critical mathematics education with intersectional feminism. We reenvision how to think about mathematical literacies. In particular, we add practices of feeling, acting, and reimagining to the conventional construct of mathematical reasoning. We reenvision ways to think about or classify real-world problem contexts by exploring three potential themes for real-world problem contexts.

Interview with Dr. Ole Skovmose


 
 
 Professor emeritus at the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University, Denmark. He develops his research from the perspective of critical mathematics education. He studies the political dimension of mathematical knowledge, and analyses the mechanisms of power as related to bringing mathematics in action. 
 His work contributes to developing central concepts of critical mathematics education (landscapes of investigation, mathematics in action, close-ups of students and the ghetto) without forgetting the per- manent relationship with its practical possibilities. He has published several books, including Towards a Philosophy of Critical Mathematics Education, translated into Spanish, Dialogue and Learning in Mathematics Education (together with Helle Alrø), 
 
 
 Traveling Through Education, In Doubt, Critique as Uncertainty, Students’ Foregrounds, and Connecting Humans With Equations (together with Ole Ravn) 
 
 

El aprendizaje de las matemáticas desde filosofía para/con niños

The article presents the theoretical construction of the relationship between mathematics learning and philosophy for/with children. The selection of a documentary corpus allowed delimiting the object of study. Then, thematic and analytical cards were elaborated to interpret the main statements, in which divergences and convergences between philosophy for/with children and the learning of mathematics were evidenced. The text is organized in six sections: Mathematical thinking as experience; Philosophy for/with children: a space for thinking; Reasoning, argumentation and logical thinking: a matter of philosophy for/with children and mathematics; the role of the question in mathematical thinking; the community of inquiry: a matter of mathematics; and, finally, from concept to mathematical thinking. The article gives an account of the reflection on the need to link the learning of mathematics with the exercise of philosophizing in order to democratize mathematics. This leads to the formation of critical, creative and ethical thinking, fundamental in the learning processes of mathematics, which becomes a pedagogical experience and a didactic bet from critical mathematics education. In conclusion, the interaction between these two disciplines transforms pedagogical practices and school contexts. The classroom becomes a space for inquiry, wonder, creation, reasoning, modeling, argumentation, training and individual and collective transformation. The learning of mathematics encompasses the need to emancipate the subjects in order to solve social injustices from the contexts, to promulgate equality and democracy through the learning of mathematics.