In this article, I deal with the question of emancipation in education. In the first part of the article, I argue that contemporary concepts of emancipation are explicitly or implicitly related to the idea of the sovereign subject articulated by Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. I contend that our modern enlightened concepts of…

This analysis of the writing in a grade 7 mathematics textbook distinguishes between closed texts and open texts, which acknowledge multiple possibilities. I use tools that have recently been applied in mathematics contexts, focussing on grammatical features that include personal pronouns, modality, and types of imperatives, as well as on…

In this paper, we use the work of philosopher Gilles Chatelet to rethink the gesture/diagram relationship and to explore the ways mathematical agency is constituted through it. We argue for a fundamental philosophical shift to better conceptualize the relationship between gesture and diagram, and suggest that such an approach might open up new…

Mathematics teacher educators are confronted with numerous challenges and complexities as they work to inspire prospective teachers to embrace inquiry-based pedagogies. The research study described in this paper asks what a teacher educator and faculty advisor can learn from prospective secondary mathematics teachers as they construct (and are…

In underscoring the affective elements of mathematics experience, we work with contemporary readings of the work of Spinoza on the politics of affect, to understand what is included in the cognitive repertoire of the Subject. We draw on those resources to tell a pedagogical tale about the relation between cognition and affect in settings of…

If mathematics is a male domain, where does this leave women who do mathematics? In a world where there is little or no discursive space in which to be female, women who enter in must do identity work in order to achieve what is often an uneasy presence. This paper builds on recent research which suggests that some undergraduate women are however…

We illustrate and exemplify how the idea of reflection is framed by the enactive concept of "deliberate analysis". In keeping with this frame, we do not attempt to define reflection but rather work on the question of "how do we do reflecting?" within such a frame. We set out our enactivist theoretical stance, in particular pointing to implications…

This paper is centered on creating equitable opportunities for learners in mathematics education. Through observations of teacher practice, the paper seeks to theorize how teachers enact their dispositions toward mathematics instruction. These observed propensities, in relation to teachers' aims for students to "take up their space" in and beyond…

In this paper, I highlight the inadequacies of contemporary theoretical and philosophical orthodoxies to fully address pedagogic change. The required change is in mathematics education, and it has to do with enabling preservice teachers, upon graduation, to rework extant power relations in implementing new interactional patterns that centre the…

Drawing on ecological psychology, this paper considers how student engagement is an accomplishment of the classroom system. Specifically, this paper presents an analysis of two teachers and their students who were using a project-based unit in their mathematics classes. The two teachers used identical curricular materials, but had dramatically…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of mathematics education as a research domain, identifying and briefly discussing four shifts or historical moments. They illustrate how researchers working in various moments conceptualize not only the interactions among teachers, students, and mathematics differently but also teachers, students,…

How might understanding emerge when learners engage mathematical phenomena through digital technologies? This paper considers the ways children's mathematical thinking was influenced by their interpretations through various pedagogical discourses and how understanding emerged through those various filters. Current research into using digital…

Empirical work has shown how mathematics education exhibits certain tensions between its value as being practically useful to production and consumption on the one hand and in offering access to scarce resources on the other hand. These tensions can be ultimately traced to the contradictions in the way mathematical knowledge enhances the use value…

Students' engagement with fictions in the form of "word problems" plays an important role in classroom practice as well as in theories of mathematical learning. Drawing on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, I show that this activity can be seen as a form of "play" or "game," where it is pretended that…

We discuss contemporary theories in mathematics education in order to do research on research. Our strategy consists of analysing discursively and ideologically recent key publications addressing the role of theory in mathematics education research. We examine how the field fabricates its object of research by deploying Foucault's notion of…