This book explores the connection between the ways people speak in mathematics classrooms and their opportunities to learn mathematics. The words spoken, heard, written and read in mathematics classrooms shape students’ sense of what mathematics is and of what people can do with mathematics. The authors employ multiple perspectives to consider the means for transformative action with respect to increasing opportunities for traditionally marginalized students to form mathematical identities that resonate with their cultural, social, linguistic, and political beings.

This book explores the connection between the ways people speak in mathematics classrooms and their opportunities to learn mathematics. The words spoken, heard, written and read in mathematics classrooms shape students’ sense of what mathematics is and of what people can do with mathematics. The authors employ multiple perspectives to consider the means for transformative action with respect to increasing opportunities for traditionally marginalized students to form mathematical identities that resonate with their cultural, social, linguistic, and political beings.

Concerns about quality mathematics education are often posed in terms of the types of mathematics that are worthwhile and valuable for both the student and society in general, and about how to best support students so that they can develop this mathematics. Concerns about equity are about who is excluded from the opportunity to develop quality mathematics within our current practices and systems, and about how to remove social barriers that systematically disadvantage those students. This collection of chapters summarises our learning about the achievement of both equity and quality agendas in mathematics education and to move forward the debate on their importance for the field.

​​This volume gathers together twenty major chapters that tackle a variety of issues associated with equity in mathematics education along the dimensions of gender, culture, curriculum diversity, and matters of a biological nature. The pursuit of equity in mathematics education is an important concern in the history of the present. Since there is no doubt about the significant role of mathematics in almost every aspect of life, it means that all individuals regardless of sex, in any age range, and in whatever context need to be provided with an opportunity to become mathematically able. The publication of this Springer volume on equity in mathematics education is situated at a time when there is strong and sustained research evidence indicating the persistence of an equity gap in mathematics, which has now enabled the mathematics education community to engage in a discourse of access for all. The research studies that are reported and discussed in the volume have been drawn from an international group of distinguished scholars whose impressive, forward-looking, and thought-provoking perspectives on relevant issues incite, broaden, and expand complicated conversations on how we might effectively achieve equity in mathematics education at the local, institutional, and systemic levels. Further, the up-to-date research knowledge in the field that is reflected in this volume provides conceptual and practical outlines for mechanisms of change, including models, examples, and usable theories that can inform the development of powerful equitable practices and the mobilization of meaningful equity interventions in different contexts of mathematics education.​

This critical volume responds to the enduring challenge in mathematics education of addressing the needs of marginalized students in school mathematics, and stems from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the North American Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA). This timely analysis brings greater clarity and support to such challenges by narrowing in on four foci: theoretical and political perspectives toward equity and justice in mathematics education, identifying and connecting to family and community funds of knowledge, student learning and engagement in preK-12 mathematics classrooms, and supporting teachers in addressing the needs of marginalized learners. Each of these areas examines how race, class, culture, power, justice and mathematics teaching and learning intersect in mathematics education to sustain or disrupt inequities, and include contributions from scholars writing about mathematics education in diverse contexts. Included in the coverage: Disrupting policies and reforms to address the needs of marginalized learners A socio-spatial framework for urban mathematics education Linking literature on allywork to the work of mathematics teacher educators Transnational families’ mathematical funds of knowledge Multilingual and technological contexts for supporting learners’ mathematical discourse Preservice teachers’ strategies for teaching mathematics with English learners Toward Equity and Social Justice in Mathematics Education is of significant interest to mathematics teacher educators and mathematics education researchers currently addressing the needs of marginalized students in school mathematics. It is also relevant to teachers of related disciplines, administrators, and instructional designers interested in pushing our thinking and work toward equity and justice in mathematics education.

This book examines the current thinking on five critical social and political areas in mathematics education. It focuses on material conditions in teaching and learning, and details features of social life and their influence on mathematics teaching, learning and achievement. Following an introduction, the first section addresses equitable access and participation in quality mathematics education. It explores this issue in different contexts and from different ideological perspectives. The second section traces the emergence and development of the notion of activism in mathematics education in theory, in the literature, in research and in practice. The third section then moves on to explore current research on the political forces at work in identity, subjectivity and (dis)ability within mathematics education, showing how emphasis on language and discourse provides information for this research, and how new directions are being pursued to address the diverse material conditions that shape learning experiences in mathematics education. Economic factors behind mathematics achievement form the topic of section four, which examines the political dimensions of mathematics education through the influence of national and global economic structures. The final section addresses distribution of power and cultural regimes of truth, based on the premise that although often deemed apolitical, mathematics and mathematics education are highly political institutions in our society. The book concludes with a summary and recommendations for the future.

Many in the mathematics community in the U.S. are involved in mathematics education in various capacities. This book highlights the breadth of the work in K-16 mathematics education done by members of US departments of mathematical sciences. It contains contributions by mathematicians and mathematics educators who do work in areas such as teacher education, quantitative literacy, informal education, writing and communication, social justice, outreach and mentoring, tactile learning, art and mathematics, ethnomathematics, scholarship of teaching and learning, and mathematics education research. Contributors describe their work, its impact, and how it is perceived and valued. In addition, there is a chapter, co-authored by two mathematicians who have become administrators, on the challenges of supporting, evaluating, and rewarding work in mathematics education in departments of mathematical sciences. This book is intended to inform the readership of the breadth of the work and to encourage discussion of its value in the mathematical community. The writing is expository, not technical, and should be accessible and informative to a diverse audience. The primary readership includes all those in departments of mathematical sciences in two or four year colleges and universities, and their administrators, as well as graduate students. Researchers in education may also find topics of interest. Other potential readers include those doing work in mathematics education in schools of education, and teachers of secondary or middle school mathematics as well as those involved in their professional development.

Mathematics education research as a discipline is situated at the confluence of an array of diffuse‚ seemingly incommensurable‚ and radically divergent discourses. Research claims that have grown out of mathematics education are wide-ranging and antagonistic rather than circumscribed by hidebound disciplinary frames. While there has never been a unified‚ totalising discipline of knowledge labelled ‘mathematics education research’‚ and while it has always been a contested terrain‚ it is fair to say that the master paradigm out of which this field has been generated has been that of cognitive psychology. Mainstream mathematics education knowledges refracting the master discourse of psychology —whereby cognition serves as the central privileged and defining concept— clearly delimits its possibilities for serving as a social tool of democratic transformation. The central point of departure of this new collection is that mathematics education research is insufficiently univocal to support the type of uncompromising interpretation that cognitive psychologists would bring to it. The hallmark contribution of this pathbreaking volume edited by Paola Valero and Robyn Zevenbergen is the paradigmatic shift the authors have effected in the field of mathematics education research‚ taking up a position at the faultline of socio-cultural analysis and critical pedagogy.

Living Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education with/in Indigenous Communities provides a critical examination of the nature, possibilities and challenges of culturally responsive mathematics education and how it is lived with/in Indigenous communities across international contexts connecting land, community, mathematics, and culture.

This book provides prospective and practicing teachers with research insights into the mathematical difficulties of students with learning disabilities and classroom practices that address these difficulties. This linkage between research and practice celebrates teachers as learners of their own students’ mathematical thinking, thus contributing an alternative view of mathematical progression in which students are taught conceptually. The research-based volume presents a unique collaboration among researchers in special education, psychology, and mathematics education from around the world. It reflects an ongoing work by members of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) and the North American Chapter of the PME Working Groups. The authors of chapters in this book, who have been collaborating extensively over the past 7 years, are from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.