Subtracting difference: troubling transitions from GCSE to AS-level mathematics

This article provides an approach to understanding the widely acknowledged difficulties experienced by young people in the transition from pre-16 to post-16 mathematics. Most approaches to understanding the disenchantment with and drop-out from AS-level mathematics focus on curriculum and assessment. In contrast, this article looks at the role of relationships, taking a psychosocial approach. It draws on data from a three-year qualitative study into why young people choose mathematics. It argues that educational practitioners and policy makers are responding to stories of failure and drop-out by excluding more people from access to mathematics. There is less and less room for difference within our mathematics classrooms. This happens because of the ways that discourses around mathematics fix how we think of the subject, who can learn it and what kind of relationships are possible between learners and mathematics. Instead the article argues for unfixing these through policies and pedagogies of difference

Telling choices: an exploration of the gender imbalance in participation

In this thesis I address the research question: how is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? This question arises out of the on-going gendered pattern of participation in mathematics beyond compulsory education in England and out of wider concerns about the ways in which inequalities are reproduced through individuals' choices. I draw on the findings of a qualitative research project, involving interviews with 43 young people (all but one aged between 16 and 19) and observations of their AS-level mathematics classes. The research participants are drawn from seven classes in three London institutions: a comprehensive school, a sixth form college and a further education college. Working within a framework drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, I argue that identity in general, and gender in particular, is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. By analysing the interviews as narratives of self, I examine in detail the ways in which choosing to do or to reject mathematics can become part of this project; that is how this choice can be read as a way of doing gender. I analyse the ways that students work the socio-cultural discourses about mathematics into their own identity work. The discourses that are most central to this process construct mathematics as 'hard', a proof of intelligence, certain, objective, associated with genius, and a signifier of social incompetence. I argue that these are oppositional and gendered. They inscribe mathematics as masculine. Thus they make it more problematic for girls and women to identify with the subject and so to succeed at and to choose it

Language, Power and Reality TV: the dynamics of race, class and gender in the UK Big Brother Jade-Shilpa row

Reality TV is often presented as an unproblematic social phenomenon which is consumed and digested by an unthinking and unsophisticated general public. We, however, argue that Reality TV is both a pervasive and important cultural form, and as such it is vital that researchers and teachers engage with it. We return to the controversial UK Big Brother 2007 arguments involving Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty. We explore how the dynamics of class, gender and race played out in this case. Using this example, we look at how celebrity culture, ideas of truth and dominant discourses of White working-class culture position both the housemates and their audiences. We further argue that the coverage of the event foreclosed any discussions of White middle-class racism by drawing on discourses that denigrate the White working-class

Mathematical Images and Gender Identities: A report on the gendering of representations of mathematics and mathematicians in popular culture and their influences on learners

This report details research into the following questions: How are representations of mathematics and mathematicians in popular culture gendered? How are the effects of these representations of mathematics and mathematicians in popular culture on learners gendered? To address these questions, we draw on detailed analysis of the following data, collected as part of an earlier Economic and Social Research Council funded project: About 50 popular cultural texts including films, websites, books, radio and television programmes. Over 500 questionnaires from 14-15 year-old GCSE students and 100 questionnaires from undergraduates in mathematics and media studies. 15 focus groups with 15-16 year-old GCSE school students and 12 focus groups with undergraduates in mathematics and social sciences and humanities. 26 individual interviews with 15-16 year-old GCSE school students and 23 individual interviews with final year undergraduates in mathematics and with undergraduates and postgraduates in social sciences and humanities. The main findings in relation to the gendering of representations of mathematicians and mathematics in popular culture are that: Mathematical representations are both invisible and ubiquitous in popular culture. And whether something is seen as mathematical depends upon context and upon the reader’s understanding of and relationship with mathematics as well as on their other cultural resources. Popular culture texts strongly support the association of mathematics with masculinity, and also with Whiteness, middle-classness and heterosexuality. This gendering happens through: the dominant representations of mathematicians being men, the disappearing of women’s mathematical contributions and the ways that women doing mathematics are subordinated in a range of ways including their youth and their positioning as appendages to ‘greater’ male mathematicians. Representations of male mathematicians combine features that ally them with heroic and powerful men and also features that present them as other, including: mental health problems, obsessiveness, fragility, and social incompetence. Their ‘genius’ is seen to mark them out from others and all other aspects of the self are subjugated to this. There is an emerging group of cultural texts featuring women mathematicians, several of which are part of a growing trend of young, attractive ‘smart girls’. While encouraging, there are questions to be raised about the low proportion of adult women mathematicians, the dramatised tensions between feminine heterosexuality and mathematics and the hyper-attractiveness of these characters. Both the representations of women and of men mathematicians, in different ways, present their mathematical abilities as ‘natural’ and as something people are born with rather than something that is acquired. Associated with the last point, representations of mathematics generally present this in ways that support ideas of its inaccessibility to the majority of the population. Popular representations of processes of doing mathematics show it as being about sudden and individual moments of inspiration that are accessible only to ‘geniuses’. This creative process is aligned with masculinity. There are some trends in popular mathematics that offer alternatives to the clichés, notably mathematics incorporating aspects of beauty, creativity, empathy and accessibility. In particular, much popular mathematics is contestable rather than set in stone. The main findings in relation to the gendered influence on learners of representations of mathematicians and mathematics in popular culture are that: There are very strong default images of mathematicians that are easily called up; these default images of mathematicians are of old, White, middle-class, heterosexual men and are associated with markings onto and into the body, including states of clothing, posture, mental health and social awkwardness or geekiness. These images reflect those circulating in popular culture. They are shared by men and women. Most participants were unable to identify attractive but unknown women as mathematicians while being aware that this was problematic. There were mixed feelings about the use of such images to sell mathematics, particularly when they were overtly sexual. Mathematics is constructed through a series of gendered oppositions such as numbers vs. words, technical vs. emotional and everyday vs. esoteric. These make mathematics something that is less attractive to women than to men. Discourses of mathematicians are also characterised by oppositions, for example between ‘normal’ mathematicians and ‘real’ mathematicians, people with ‘natural’ ability and those who just cannot get it or who need to work hard to do so. These discourses link to distinctions between everyday and esoteric mathematics. Again, these images reflect those circulating in popular culture and were shared by men and women but have gendered effects. Women are less likely to self-identify as having mathematical ability than men and this makes it more difficult for them to choose to continue with the subject. Both men and women’s sense of their mathematical ability derived largely from external factors, prominent among these were assessment results and positions within teaching groups that are setted by ‘ability’. The ways that people read images of mathematicians and mathematics depend on the understandings or resources people bring to them. For example, participants who identified with feminism more often read mathematical ability into feminine bodies and participants who identified with mathematics more often read examples of creativity as mathematical. Popular mathematicians and mathematics can provide a resource for developing positive relationships with mathematics. In particular, popular mathematicians can provide points of identification and popular mathematics can provide a space to explore ‘alternative’ understandings of mathematics that cut across some of the oppositions

Troubling "understanding mathematics-in-depth": Its role in the identity work of student-teachers in England

Copyright @ The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.comThis article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.In this paper, we focus on an initiative in England devised to prepare non-mathematics graduates to train as secondary mathematics teachers through a 6-month Mathematics Enhancement Course (MEC) to boost their subject knowledge. The course documentation focuses on the need to develop “understanding mathematics in-depth” in students in order for them to become successful mathematics teachers. We take a poststructural approach, so we are not interested in asking what such an understanding is, about the value of this approach or about the effectiveness of the MECs in developing this understanding in their participants. Instead we explore what positions this discourse of “understanding mathematics in-depth” makes available to MEC students. We do this by looking in detail at the “identity work” of two students, analysing how they use and are used by this discourse to position themselves as future mathematics teachers. In doing so, we show how even benign-looking social practices such as “understanding mathematics in-depth” are implicated in practices of inclusion and exclusion. We show this through detailed readings of interviews with two participants, one of whom fits with the dominant discourses in the MEC and the other who, despite passing the MEC, experiences tensions between her national identity work and MEC discourses. We argue that it is vital to explore “identity work” within teacher education contexts to ensure that becoming a successful mathematics teacher is equally available to all.King’s College Londo

Young people's uses of celebrity: Class, gender and 'improper' celebrity

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865.In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology

ASPIRES3 Summary Report: Computing

In this report, we share evidence from the ASPIRES research project, a fourteen-year, mixed methods investigation of the factors shaping young people’s trajectories in, through and out of STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), with a particular focus on access to STEM degrees. The study collected survey data from over 47,000 young people and conducted over 760 qualitative interviews with a longitudinal sample, which tracked 50 young people (and their parents/ carers) between the ages of 10 and 22. The project also conducted secondary analyses of UK National Statistics and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data sets on England domiciled students, aged 18 to 24. This report focuses on analyses of survey data collected at age 21/22 and longitudinal interviews conducted from age 10 to 22, to shed light on the factors shaping STEM trajectories, particularly at degree level

Mathematical stories: Why do more boys than girls choose to study mathematics at AS-level in England?

Copyright @ 2005 Taylor & FrancisIn this paper I address the question: How is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? I draw on the findings of a qualitative research study involving interviews with 43 young people all studying mathematics in post-compulsory education in England. Working within a post-structuralist framework, I argue that gender is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. Through a detailed reading of Toni and Claudia’s stories I explore the tensions for young women who are engaging in mathematics, something that is discursively inscribed as masculine, while (understandably) being invested in producing themselves as female. I conclude by arguing that seeing ‘doing mathematics’ as ‘doing masculinity’ is a productive way of understanding why mathematics is so male dominated and by looking at the implications of this understanding for gender and mathematics reform work.This work is funded by the ESR