"If Hygiene and Happiness Seem Foreign to Teaching Mathematics...": Affective Bodies, Health, and Mathematics Education

• In Event: Centering Health for Embodied and Affective Learning

Abstract

This paper examines the claim that mathematics education has long eschewed or ignored bodies and affectivity. While ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ have often been centered in mathematics education-related literature, strategies of intervention and reform also have long histories of differentially targeting bodies and recruiting affectivity under the auspices of promoting health and well-being. We trace some of those histories and examines their dangers with respect to a proliferation of recent efforts to recruit bodies and affectivity for learning mathematics and calls to center children’s health at a time of exacerbated racisms, xenophobias, sexisms, ableisms, nationalisms, and other forms of violence occurring in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors

• Ryan Ziols, Georgia State University

• Abhinav Ghosh, Harvard University