‘Walking in a Foreign and Unknown Landscape’ : studying the history of mathematics in initial teacher education

This article develops the argument that students in initial teacher education benefit in terms of who they are becoming from developing awareness of and engagement in the history of mathematics. Initially, current school mathematics practices in the UK are considered and challenged. Then the role of teachers’ relationship to mathematical subject knowledge and of teachers’ engagement in critical thinking are considered. Connections are made between these concerns and studying the history of mathematics in initial teacher education classrooms. I then draw on the perspectives and practices of the mathematics teacher educators at one institution to understand these connections better and to exemplify them. Issues of equity are threaded throughout

The teaching of higher education mathematics by pre-service mathematics teacher educators: How might this contribute to social justice? A consideration of a possible approach

This paper considers the teaching of higher education mathematics as part of pre-service teacher education and the potential for it to contribute to social justice. In it I ask and seek to offer one possible answer to the following question: By enacting within their own higher education mathematics teaching an enquiry-based pedagogy informed by considerations of fairness and equality, can mathematics education tutors open up possibilities for their students to engage more deeply with such practices and the attendant commitment to social justice? A set of exemplar practices drawn from my own teaching is briefly described and discussed and responses from a cohort of students considered

The teaching of higher education mathematics by pre-service mathematics teacher educators: How might this contribute to social justice? A consideration of a possible approach

This paper considers the teaching of higher education mathematics as part of pre-service teacher education and the potential for it to contribute to social justice. In it I ask and seek to offer one possible answer to the following question: By enacting within their own higher education mathematics teaching an enquiry-based pedagogy informed by considerations of fairness and equality, can mathematics education tutors open up possibilities for their students to engage more deeply with such practices and the attendant commitment to social justice? A set of exemplar practices drawn from my own teaching is briefly described and discussed and responses from a cohort of students considered

Learning Mathematics without Limits and All-attainment Grouping in Secondary Schools: Pete's story

This article is about Pete’s story. It is a story about introducing all attainment teaching in a secondary school mathematics department and about espousing and enacting a pedagogy and set of practices to enable learning mathematics without limits

"No, it just didn't work": a teacher's reflections on all-attainment teaching

Setting - the practice by which learners are allocated to different classes on the basis of perceived ability - is a social justice issue. Despite overwhelming evidence that, overall, setting is educationally harmful and in discriminatory ways, the practice is almost universal in English secondary mathematics classrooms. To gain insight into this apparent contradiction, we offer the story of a single teacher's ultimate rejection of all-attainment teaching

Possibilities for mathematics education? : Aphoristic fragments from the past

Our contribution to this special issue is not intended to offer a theoretical argument in conversation with the papers which form The Disorder on Mathematics Education (Straehler-Pohl, Bohlmann and Pais, 2017). It is informed by much of the thinking contained therein and driven by a similar concern with the institutionalisation (and therefore the inevitable co-option and colonisation) of the socio-political dimensions of academic research in mathematics education. However, it is intended to sit alongside as a disorderly and comparatively uninvited guest at the conversation. Rather than advocating a specific set of approaches to the teaching and learning of mathematics for social justice, we are striving after a disorderliness of format to allow the advancement of a (somewhat utopian) imagination and hope, to unsettle ourselves and others and to offer the occasional, penumbrian glimpse of 'the speculative could' (Straehler-Pohl, Pais and Bohlmann, 2017, p. 3). We present research fragments collected as part of an activist project without introduction or comment; however, alongside these, we offer more conventional text on neo-liberalism, the need to historicise the present, aphoristic thinking and the need for "somewhere" to b