Across the set of articles in this Special Issue, various authors describe methodology and methodological decisions, illustrate analyses, and share emerging findings from The Evolution of the Discourse of School Mathematics (EDSM) project. In general, the investigators were interested in identifying "changes over time in the kind of engagement in mathematics expected of school students in England" (Morgan, this issue, p. 121). In this article Beth Herbel-Eisenmann focuses on three articles by the project investigators, Morgan, Sfard and Tang. Herbel-Eisenmann comments on some strengths of this work and questions aspects of the methodology, including the combination of theoretical constructs, broader issues of context and what counts as mathematics, and author positionality.