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Signifying “students”, “teachers” and “mathematics”: a reading of a special issue

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Abstract

This paper examines a Special Issue of Educational Studies in Mathematics comprising research reports centred on Peircian semiotics in mathematics education, written by some of the major authors in the area. The paper is targeted at inspecting how subjectivity is understood, or implied, in those reports. It seeks to delineate how the conceptions of subjectivity suggested are defined as a result of their being a function of the domain within which the authors reflexively situate themselves. The paper first considers how such understandings shape concepts of mathematics, students and teachers. It then explores how the research domain is understood by the authors as suggested through their implied positioning in relation to teachers, teacher educators, researchers and other potential readers.

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Notes

  1. A reviewer of an earlier draft argued that in responding to the Special Issue authors on my agenda rather than theirs I am committing an “ethical violation” in distorting their original meanings. I would respond by arguing that some accounts of contemporary ethics (e.g. Badiou 2001; Butler 2005) are centred on subjects being obliged to operate within oppressive discursive domains rather than on individuals doing their own thing. And such obligations, it has been suggested (Žižek 2008), bring with them support for the agenda built into those domains, which can result in symbolic violence to those disadvantaged in those modes of depiction (e.g. would be problem solvers in a basic competency ethos, collectivists in an individualistic world or vice versa). Thus I see my analysis as an interrogation of the discursive domains that shape the Special Issue authors’ work and my own, as well as school practices, rather than of the individual authors and their intentions. My target is the practices of mathematics teaching in school where ethical violations are held in place by the custom and practice of discursive operations.

  2. I have attempted parodies of this aspect of Lacan’s work in an African mathematics education context (Bradford and Brown 2005), and in relation to teacher subjectivity (Brown, Atkinson and England 2006, pp. 244–254).

  3. I am also guilty of this!

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  1. Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Tony Brown

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Brown, T. Signifying “students”, “teachers” and “mathematics”: a reading of a special issue. Educ Stud Math 69, 249–263 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-008-9130-8

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