EPILOGUE

The table of contents of this double issue included the above quote from the historian Howard Zinn which might seem puzzling to the reader. Why was this quote included and what is it supposed to mean? In the opening editorial, I mused over the whole enterprise of scholarly publishing and what it amounts to in the grand scheme of things. Zinn’s quote reminds us that academia is a cloistered unit and many of the things we place importance on in the academic culture of publish or perish seem insignificant when viewed through the lens of real problems that occur outside the academic cloister. It can also mean that we are sitting in a position of privilege in our ivory tower offices while others are not

BOOK REVIEW: WHAT\u27S ALL THE COMMOTION OVER COMMOGNITION? A REVIEW OF ANNA SFARD\u27S THINKING AS COMMUNICATING

If straight edge and compass constructions are the so-called “atoms” of Euclidean geometry, if sequences are the “atoms” of Analysis, then what are the “atoms” (if any) of mathematics education? Arguably mathematics education is a much wider field than Euclidean Geometry or Elementary Analysis, however there are several fundamental things that the field purports to study, chief among which is mathematical thinking or more generally “thinking”. The book under review, though it appears in a Cambridge University Press series entitled Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, is in my view situated at the intersection of Consciousness Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy and Mathematics Education. One does not come across books within the mathematics education genre that take on the tasks of operationalizing thinking and defining consciousness. This review began a year ago when an excerpt from the book was included in vol5, nos2&3 [July 2008] of the journal. My personal interest in the contents of the book lay in the promise that the book would tackle existing dichotomies in the current discourses on thinking with the aim of showing they are resolvable or even transcend-able