Stem(ming) from Where? A Philosophical Analysis of U.S. Mathematics Education Policies

Much attention has been placed on mathematics education in U.S. education policy reform discourses. Most recently, the emphasis has been on connecting mathematics with science, technology, and engineering, termed The STEM Initiative. Although a great deal of research has been conducted to understand how to meet the objectives of STEM, studies are limited in their focus and rarely question the philosophical assumptions inherent in policies. This is a mistake since mathematics is a field of knowledge deeply entrenched in historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives. A content analysis study of mathematics education policy, this dissertation employs a philosophical perspective, influenced by the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou, in order to explore the philosophical categories found in publically disseminated national policy documents about mathematics education in the U.S. In this dissertation study I examined the ontological assumptions, epistemological claims, and axiological objectives that can be found in current U.S. mathematics education policies. I asked what societal and political consequences can ensue from the way in which mathematics is conceptualized in educational policy discourse and what implications this discourse has on public school professionals teaching mathematics today. The findings of this dissertation study move the diverse debates in mathematics education by offering a more complex picture of the structure by which our society values mathematics and prescribes how it should be learned. Ultimately, it is the hope of the researcher that this work helps provide agency to educators working in the field, so that they may have the necessary knowledge about the intricacies of the policies that they themselves are responsible to implement, as well as the added philosophical knowledge to invigorate the mathematics classroom with the potentiality for radical changes in the way students come to understand and later use mathematics in their lives

Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences

The idea of discipline opens up a nexus of meaning. Disciplines discipline disciples.1 A commitment to a discipline is a way of ensuring that certain disciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects, methods and concepts are ruled out. By contrast, ideas of interdisciplinarity imply a variety of boundary transgressions, in which the disciplinary and disciplining rules, trainings and subjectivities given by existing knowledge corpuses are put aside. In this introduction we interrogate the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, in particular the ascendance in recent years of a particular discourse on interdisciplinarity where it is associated with a more generalised transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. We are therefore less concerned with interdisciplinarity in general than with the contemporary formation of interdisciplinarity: how it has come to be seen as a solution to a series of current problems, in particular the relations between science and society, the development of accountability, and the need to foster innovation in the knowledge economy. The present situation, we will suggest, can be understood as a problematisation: 2 the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue and an object of enquiry for governments, funding agencies and researchers