Preface: The disorder of mathematics education, Part II. Critique, imagination and play

The idea of conceiving mathematics education as a disorder evolved at a small conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin from January 15th to 17th in 2015. The conference aimed at destabilizing taken-for-granted truths that lay at the heart of mathematics education as a research field. While the "socio-political branch" proclaims a critique of "mainstream" mathematics education to be at the core of its "collective identity", the common premise of the participants of the meeting was that the radicality of this critique is more often than not domesticized for the sake of ordering its object in a way that it suits well the storylines that are commonly narrated. The conference and the book that resulted from that conference (The disorder of mathematics education; Straehler-Pohl, Bohlmann & Pais 2017) had a clear focus: developing a critique of the status quo of mathematics education research, including, and perhaps more importantly, research within a sociopolitical vein

Early life history and metamorphosis in Malo maxima Gershwin, 2005 (carukiidae, cubozoa, cnidaria)

This research presents the early life history stages of Malo maxima, a recently described tropical Australian cubozoan from the family Carukiidae, from sexual fertilisation to metamorphosis including planula, polyp, asexual reproductive strategies and young medusa. We discuss the similarities between M. maxima and two closely related carukiid species from Japan and Australia including morphology and behaviours previously undocumented in the class Cubozoa. All three carukiids can reproduce by mono-disk strobilation, a strategy common to all other orders of the class Scyphozoa but only recently described in Cubozoa

Learning to fail and learning from failure – ideology at work in a mathematics classroom

When actualized in a concrete school, the official discourse of inclusion and equity often encounters a series of obstacles that research strives to identify and address under the imperative to eliminate them. Through the exploration of classroom episodes, teacher interviews and field notes from a German secondary school, we take failure not as a correctable obstacle but as a symptom of the ideology at work in current educational practices. Symptoms, as Žižek, (after Lacan) suggested, cannot be eliminated but always (re)emerge since they concern the impossibility of official discourses actualizing themselves. We thus argue for a research agenda that learns from failure instead of research concerned with the possible successes that might prospectively be brought into existence, if just the "right" theory was applied "correctly"