Mathematics Education Library

3 primary works

Mathematics Education and Language

by Tony Brown

Published 31 July 1997

`Contemporary thinking on philosophy and the social sciences has been dominated by analyses that emphasise the importance of language in understanding societies and individuals functioning within them; important developments which have been under-utilised by researchers in mathematics education. This book reaches out to contemporary work in these broader fields; drawing on original sources in key areas such as Gadamer and Ricoeur's development of hermeneutics, Habermas' work in critical social theory, Schutz's social phenomenology, Saussure's linguistics and the post-structuralist analysis of Derrida, Foucault and Barthes. Through examining the writings of these major thinkers it is shown how language is necessarily instrumental in developing mathematical understanding; but a language that is in a permanent state of becoming, resisting stable connections to the ideas it locates. The analysis offered extends from children doing mathematics to teachers inspecting and developing their own professional practices.'

Mathematics Education and Subjectivity

by Tony Brown

Published 9 July 2011

This book is centrally concerned with how mathematics education is represented and how we understand mathematical teaching and learning with view to changing them. It considers teachers, students and researchers. It explores their mathematical thinking and the concepts that this thought produces. But also how these concepts acquire cultural layers that mediate our apprehension. The book examines some of the linguistic and socio-cultural filters that influence mathematical understanding. But above all it introduces some contemporary theories of human subjectivity, in which subjectivity is seen primarily as consequential to, rather than productive of, our attempts to represent or categorise the world in which we live. That is, our sense of who we are results from our attempts to see ourselves against the various versions of the world that we encounter. Such theories trouble the very notion of mathematical "concepts" as apprehended by "humans". And in foregrounding this concern with subjectivity the book considers mathematics rather differently to styles more familiar in many instances of mathematics education research. The book proposes that mathematics can provoke us to think differently about our world and as a result enable our transformative capacities. Such an orientation may disturb our understanding of what mathematics is, how it exists in an "objective" sense, insofar as mathematical objects can be derived from social filters being applied to the world, but also serve as filters on the world capable of producing new social entities.

 

Becoming a Mathematics Teacher

by Tony Brown and Olwen McNamara

Published 14 February 2011

The book is centered on how major curriculum reform shapes mathematics and the professional practices of teachers. This book documents in real time the implementation of a major government numeracy programme and its receipt by trainee and new teachers. It documents the complete life span of that initiative. The account is targeted at an international readership in terms of how curriculum reform more generally shapes mathematics in schools and the practices of teachers. A key dimension of the book is an alternative view of mathematics education research in which the task of teacher development is understood at policy level where large numbers of teachers were interviewed to assess how policies were being processed through individuals. The book provides an easy and accessible commentary utilising contemporary theory to describe how such teachers reconcile their personal aspirations with the external demands they encounter in negotiating their identities as professional teachers.