Being good" al maths: Fabricating gender subjectivity (original) (raw)
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Mathematical Images and Identities: education, entertainment, social justice
This is a study of: the representations of maths and mathematicians in popular culture; the ways that they influence learners’ relationships with the subject and their choices of whether or not to study maths; and of the role of social class, gender and ethnicity in these representations and processes. During the project we collected data from the following groups: • Year 10 - 11 students in three comprehensive schools, one in London, one in a large town in the South and one in a rural area in the South West. • University students about half of whom were in maths and half in humanities and social science courses, and about half of whom were in post-1992 and half in Russell group universities. The data consisted of: a survey of 556 Year 10 students in three schools and 100 undergraduates, 27 focus groups with 129 of these participants and individual interviews with 49 of them. We also built up an archive of popular culture texts relating to maths and mathematicians that were mentioned in the survey, and carried out a detailed analysis of over 40 of these. Our main findings are that: • Popular cultural texts create a range of possible meanings and that the ways that they are read by someone depends on the resources they bring to them; for example, whether a text can be read as mathematical depends on someone’s understanding of maths. In particular we found that people with a positive relationship with maths are more likely to see maths and mathematicians within popular culture and that for some people, usually male, a relationship with popular cultural texts can support a developing relationship with maths, with specific images being something they want to become. • Many people have clichéd views about maths and mathematicians which discourage them from choosing to study the subject after GCSE and inhibit their engagement with it in adulthood. A substantial majority of both Year 11 students and university undergraduates saw maths as little more than numbers and mathematicians as old, white, middle-class men. Their images of maths were often narrow, inaccurate and confined to numbers and basic arithmetic. They saw mathematicians as lacking social skills, having no personal life outside of maths and as obsessional. Our research linked these clichés with many of the popular cultural representations of maths and mathematicians, and to negative attitudes to the subject. • Participants were aware that the images they had and that were presented to them in popular culture were clichés and often both used them and distanced themselves from them. For example, one participant in a Year 11 focus group said, a mathematician is “a very sort of stereotypical geek type of person, but obviously they aren’t all like that”. However, they were unable to produce more positive ideas about maths and mathematicians because of the lack of alternatives available within their experiences of school maths and of popular culture. • While popular cultural discourses are a significant way in which these clichéd meanings are circulated, they are not the only one. School maths and family influences are at least as important, and both can counter the effects of popular culture or support them. • Despite our focus on a few specific representations, maths is both ubiquitous and invisible in popular culture, with a huge number of texts coming up only once or twice on the survey and for a range of different reasons. The focus group and interview interactions suggest that focusing on these examples has pedagogic possibilities for opening up different ways of relating to maths.
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
Current research in mathematics education places emphasis on the analysis of men and women’s accounts about their life trajectories and choices for studying, working and developing a career that involves the learning and teaching of mathematics. Within this realm, the present study aims to highlight how mathematics, gender and subjectivity become interwoven by focusing the analysis on a single case study, that of Irene –a teacher in her early 40s. Based on how she articulates hegemonic discourses and narrates her relation to mathematics from the time she was a schoolgirl up till her recent work as teacher and her endeavours as participant in a professional development teacher training course, we argue how ‘mathematics’ becomes a mythical object for her subjectification. Irene as a female subject appropriates through her narrative the socially, culturally and historically constructed ideals about maths and gender and essentialises mathematical ability. Our study reveals how dominant ...
Undoing mathematics? Troubling fantasies of gender and mathematics
In this chapter, I analyse the responses of 50 learners (27 students in their final year of compulsory schooling, and 23 university students) to the prompt: 'Imagine a world where mathematicians appear on TV regularly, what kind of world is this?' The terrains of popular culture, and perhaps especially television, with its location in the domestic world of the home and its plethora of lifestyle, cookery and talk shows are often constructed as feminised spaces. I take as my starting point the struggles of our research participants to imagine what would happen when the masculine field of mathematics enters this softer, more feminine sphere. I look at where their imagination takes them and where it cannot. I am interested in asking: In what ways does this change mathematics and those who do it? And what are the pedagogic, epistemological and social justice possibilities of such fantasies? This book is no longer publicly available for purchase so I've uploaded it here. Reference: Mendick, H. (2008) Undoing mathematics? Troubling fantasies of gender and mathematics. In: A. Chronaki (Ed.) Mathematics, Technologies, Education: the gender perspective. Volos: Thessaly University Press.
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 2012
Imagine you have woken from a dream, a dream brimming with meaning, with passion, with mystery. You try to sustain the feeling, recount the details, share the experience. You fail. Your powers of reconstruction too meager, your tongue too clumsy. Mathematics is such a dream, dreamed by individuals, personal, yet remarkably in a waking state, and provoking sufficient commonality in its recounting to bring individuals together, to create a community of shared passion. The first dreamer of the dream, shrouded in history and myth, perhaps was Thales of Miletus, who later advised Pythagoras of Samos who subsequently founded an order of adherents holding knowledge and property in common while pursuing philosophical and mathematical studies as a moral basis for the conduct of life
MATHEMATICS AND ITS IMAGES OF THE PUBLIC
2013
The paper is an attempt to understand the historical processes by which mathematics and its publics have come to imagine each other in our society, by looking into two different instances from the past. Introducing the kaṇakkatikāram tradition of engaging with mathematics in the Tamil speaking region, we argue how it framed mathematics as both skill and useful knowledge while inviting its public to make themselves clever and prudent. It also claimed for itself a sense of virtuosity through systematic exposition of a theory of its own computational practice. In the second instance discussed, we argue how the institutional components of this tradition became part of a pedagogic apparatus in Europe as well as part of colonial education, while becoming part of a Christian value system of emulation and perseverance while contending with the emergent liberal ethos of education in early nineteenth century Britain.
CALLING A SPADE A SPADE: MATHEMATICS IN THE NEW PATTERN OF DIVISION OF LABOUR
The growing disconnection of the majority of population from mathematics is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This paper attempts to point to deeper roots of this cultural and social phenomenon. It concentrates on mathematics education, as the most important and better documented area of interaction of mathematics with the rest of human culture. I argue that new patterns of division of labour have dramatically changed the nature and role of mathematical skills needed for the labour force and correspondingly changed the place of mathematics in popular culture and in the mainstream education. The forces that drive these changes come from the tension between the ever deepening specialisation of labour and ever increasing length of specialised training required for jobs at the increasingly sharp cutting edge of technology. Unfortunately these deeper socio-economic origins of the current systemic crisis of mathematics education are not clearly spelt out, neither in cultural studies nor, even more worryingly, in the education policy discourse; at the best, they are only euphemistically hinted at. This paper is an attempt to describe the socio-economic landscape of mathematics education without resorting to euphemisms.