“Global” Mathematics, Political Projects, and Collective Action

• In Event: Social and justice issues in mathematics education

Proposal

“Global” Mathematics, Political Projects, and Collective Action?

The continued need for students at all educational levels to experience high-quality mathematics instruction is a global concern that will only increase as societies wrestle with the introduction of new technologies and the problems created by the inevitable side effects of technological advance. We can go back as far as 1908 to find, in the creation of the International Commission of Mathematical Instruction, the establishment of organizations that seek to facilitate international cooperation in mathematics instruction and improve its practice. While collaboration is beneficial, one major problem that hinders cooperation is the difficulty in separating the practice of mathematics instruction from the social, economic, and institutional factors that heavily influence individual outcomes for students (Goos & Halai, 2022).
It must be said that inequality is an underlying factor in our world and mathematics instruction is no exception (Atweh, et. al., 2004). The differences between the material substance of privileged communities and those who have been marginalized affect how researchers and teachers look to examine and solve questions. Discussions of how to ensure an equitable mathematics education can look very different in well-resourced settings as opposed to poorer ones. For example, some wealthy school divisions in the United States are eliminating advanced math courses in middle school (Boston Globe, July 2023) because school leaders find that the presence of these classes exacerbate racial disparities. As one might imagine in low-resource settings, a decision to purposely eliminate a math course would be an unimaginable luxury in situations where finding qualified teachers and adequate resources is a challenge.
As mathematics education has undergone a “social turn” (Lerman, 2000) and even a “socio-political” turn (Gutierrez, 2013), mathematics educators, as per the theme of the 2024 CIES conference, have realized that they too must raise their voices in protest of conditions that affect how students appreciate and learn mathematics. The question remains of how that might be done on a “global” scale where contextual realities are very different for different people. The “power of protest”, after all, resides in a common, collective, and unified call for change towards a more just system.
This paper will draw upon the non-Alignment strategy expressed by Bright (2023) in a recent paper on political philosophy. Bright uses the Cold War analogy of the non-aligned movement to examine how scholars and activists might navigate together in a world where the interests of the dominant may not necessarily serve the interests of all people. Research and practices that focus on dominant narratives such as educational rankings (we can not all, by definition, be above average) or skills (which only obtain value in the corporate world through scarcity) can never be fully reconciled with meaningful reductions in inequity.
Dewey (1906) observed that cooperation was possible through “joint activity” where “one person’s use of materials and tools is consciously referred to the uses that other persons are making of their capacities and appliances”. This paper proposes that scholars and activists seeking to benefit the marginalized would be more effective if they divorce their activities from the irreconcilable passions of their local contexts and instead develop cohesive new ones that would form the basis of continuous international protest.

Author

• Jay A Bradley, George Mason University