Clever girls' stories: the girl they call a nerd

In this paper we explore the issue of gender and mathematics participation, focusing on the ways in which “clever girls” self-author within the discourse order of a high ability group, which has particular significance in the Norwegian context in which this study took place. Contrasting the cases of three girls, only one of whom (Anna) chooses to continue with a higher level of mathematics (mathematics for science), we consider the ways in which they manage being members of the “smart group”. We analyse in particular the storying of Anna as a “nerd”, and the social cost of being a “clever girl” against the backdrop of a public discourse of equality of opportunity in Norway

Choosing mathematics: the narrative of the self as a site of agency

In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and methodological issues in exploring identity and agency within a narrative of choosing mathematics. Taking as our starting point Bakhtin’s emphasis on the dialogic space between interlocutors, we explore how an awareness of the addressivity and otherness of utterances, and of the role of genre and heteroglossia in self-authoring, can be used in the analysis of an interview to gain insight into one student’s narrative of choosing mathematics despite the fear that it held for her. We consider how our own research preoccupations with the role of gender and family discourses in learners’ relationships with mathematics played a part in the interview, and how the interviewee’s appropriation of, and resistance to, these and other genres can be understood as an assertion of agency within her particular narrative of choice

Theory in and for mathematics education: in pursuit of a critical agenda

© 2016 The Author(s)This special issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics, developed from the Mathematics Education and Contemporary Theory (MECT) conferences in Manchester, U.K., follows up an earlier double special issue in Volume 80 (2012) of this journal, which comprised 18 papers authored from a dozen countries. These efforts—both in conference and in print—to develop theory in and for mathematics education should be seen as part of our community’s collective effort to offer mathematics education broader yet more rigorous “thinking tools”. We argue in this introduction that in these times where ideology so often defines “improvement” in preference to rigorous analysis, this effort is more important than ever before. The selected papers span two broad areas: theory is used to develop critical conceptual frameworks for studies in mathematics education by Llewellyn, Nolan, Barwell, Nardi, Pais; and philosophical dimensions of mathematical learning are discussed by Ernest, Skovsmose, and Boylan