This paper investigates storylines from newcomers’ perspectives on their experiences of learning mathematics in an introductory mathematics classroom setting in Norway. We engaged in participatory research at a school over time. The data in this article come from observations and conversational interviews. Positioning theory guided our analysis in identifying storylines and related positionings. Our analysis provided us with the following four storylines: (1) newcomers find mathematics easy because they are also learning a new language; (2) newcomers experience tensions when learning mathematics in a new language; (3) newcomers find math teachers extra kind and find that they extend their help to them more than usual; (4) newcomers seek alternative resources for learning advanced mathematics. The identified storylines serve as a valuable resource to understand the newcomers’ wishes and desires for their mathematics education in a context of not yet knowing the language of instruction and educational culture. We recommend listening to newcomers’ perspectives of their experiences and recognizing the strengths they bring to the classroom to understand how they navigate their situation while learning mathematics in multilingual mathematics learning settings.

This study explores how school leaders in Norway conceptualize and navigate the challenges of organizing inclusive mathematics education in increasingly superdiverse school environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 14 school leaders and informed by positioning theory, monolingual habitus, and superdiversity, the research examines how school leaders’ everyday school leadership discourse frames linguistic and cultural diversity. Findings reveal two dominant storylines: one positioning linguistic diversity as a source of educational difficulty, and another privileging monolingual solutions to multilingual dilemmas. School leaders often face systemic constraints and resource limitations, yet demonstrate awareness of the nuanced needs of multilingual learners. However, their responses frequently default to deficit framings and reinforce the dominant monolingual norm. The study calls for a paradigmatic shift in leadership practice and policy—from reactive, language-as-deficit models to proactive, asset-based frameworks rooted in superdiversity. Emphasizing participatory approaches and the development of a multilingual habitus, the paper argues that school leaders must be empowered to foster equity-oriented pedagogies and inclusive school cultures that respond more effectively to the complexities of contemporary migration and linguistic pluralism.

We asked students to propose three ingredients for a magic pill to make anyone "very good at mathematics" in our Swedish context. This chapter engages both what students perceive as values in mathematics, and what they put up as characteristics for persons who know mathematics. We include a political dimension on the processes of inclusion and exclusion to understand the transforming powers in a pill for making anyone "very good at mathematics". 735 Swedish students in grade five and eight answered the question. The results show how students put mathematical facts about numbers and calculations in their pills, together with ingredients to make you fast and intelligent, but also magic, such as unicorns. Ingredients transforming the person taking the pill were more common for girls. The suggested ingredients are reminders of the importance of reducing the emphasis on exclusionary practices, based on ability or being fast when doing mathematics. Instead, the recommendation for teachers is to include "an ounce of joy and happiness", as one girl puts in her pill.

We have interviewed becoming mathematics teachers, in the last semester of their education, asking how they experience their time as teacher students with the focus on inclusive teaching. In their forthcoming daily work, they will be responsible for arranging for inclusive teaching that addresses all the learners' needs in mathematics. We believe the voices of future teachers are important to include in conversations about how programs prepare future mathematics teachers for the work of teaching in today's schools and classrooms. We used storylines as a theoretical construct to discuss the socio-political aspects of mathematics teacher education through the lens of two research questions: What storylines emerged in interviews with becoming mathematics teachers in their last semester of teacher education when they talked about teaching in diverse classrooms? What implications might these storylines have on mathematics teacher education? Our analysis made us aware of three important storylines: (1) storylines about the importance of language in mathematics education; (2) storylines about the importance of accepting diverse methods when doing mathematics; and (3) storylines about issues of invisibility at play in mathematics classrooms. In this paper, we discuss the importance of creating space for discussions in teacher education about issues that may challenge inclusive practices in mathematics classrooms.

Public media both reflects and shapes societal perceptions and attitudes. Teachers and others around students in mathematics classrooms have expectations for the students, projected with what appears in these media. We are most concerned about the expectations placed on students who are identified with minoritized groups—particularly students who are Indigenous or migrated to Norway. We investigate how minoritized group contexts and mathematics education appear together in Norwegian news media texts. Our analysis uses the notion of storylines to describe the expectations about minoritized groups that news media project. We found seven entangled storylines: “the majority language and culture are keys to learning and knowing mathematics,” “mathematics is language- and culture-neutral,” “minoritized groups’ mathematics achievements are linked to culture and gender,” “extraordinary measures are needed to teach students from minoritized groups mathematics,” “students from minoritized groups underachieve,” “students from minoritized groups put in extraordinary effort and time to learn mathematics,” and “minoritized mathematics students are motivated by gratitude.”

Based on a synthesis of connections between ethnomathematics and critical mathematics education, we present a set of four “concerns,” framing what we call culturally situated critical mathematics education. We see any ethnomathematics or critical mathematics education work as fitting within this framing. We illustrate the framework with an analysis of two empirical articles, one reporting an ethnomathematical teaching and research project in a Sámi context, and one reporting on a critical mathematics education teaching and research project in an underprivileged context in the USA. Our analysis shows how the concerns bring the strengths of ethnomathematics to critical mathematics education and vice versa. research. Both critical mathematics education and ethnomathematical research and teaching have strong potential to use mathematics as a tool for identifying and analysing critical features in both the local and global contexts that impact what happens in mathematics classrooms. These articles show how mathematics may better serve both students and teachers in a particular community.

In March 2020, near the onset of the COVID-19 related lockdowns, quarantine, and isolation measures being taken worldwide, we noticed an increasing number of graphs, diagrams, images, and mathematical models relating to the pandemic posted on our Facebook walls. For the purposes of this paper, we selected a number of these Facebook posts to discuss and analyze, through the lens of questions based in critical mathematics education research. Our analyses draw attention to public discourse(s) around mathematics, as well as how numbers, graphs, diagrams, and images are used on Facebook. In our analyses, we first identify the mathematics topic/concept being depicted through the image and, second, how that Facebook post might serve as an artefact of critical mathematics education. In doing so, we challenge the usual separation of mathematics classrooms from the real world and highlight how, in this time of pandemic, life is less real than it is surreal; it is less real than it is virtual. Keywords: mathematical modelling; real-world problems; images, critical mathematics education; mathematics and social media; virtual reality; Facebook; mathematics in society; mathematics teaching; mathematics teacher education

AbstractIn this chapter, we report on a small-scale critical mathematics education project in a Swedish classroom with students of varied language backgrounds. The project departed from the student Arvid’s statement “Mathematics is bad for society.” Our research interest was twofold. On the one hand, we wanted to explore what knowledge is being (re)produced by students as they try to connect and reason with a statement like “Mathematics is bad for society.” And on the other hand, we were also interested in how the students in this classroom, in which they do not have shared mother tongues, can express and (dis)acknowledge knowledge when reasoning about mathematics in society. We found that when the students (and their teacher) grappled with unpacking critical aspects such as “mathematics in society,” their reciprocal assessment of claims was based on their individual ways of knowing and talking, and tended to shape both their actions and the outcome of their efforts. We show that the discussion around critical aspects of mathematics in society that came to the fore was intertwined with both students’ and the teacher’s (lack of) meta-understanding of language diversity.

There is no shortage of urgent, complex problems that mathematics education can and should engage with. Pandemics, forest fires, pollution, Black Lives Matter protests, and fake news all involve mathematics, are matters of life and death, have a clear political dimension, and are interdisciplinary in nature. They demand a critical approach. The authors in this volume showcase new insights, teaching ideas and new and unique ways of applying critical mathematics education, in areas as diverse as climate change, obesity, decolonisation and ethnomathematics. This book demonstrates that there is plenty to be done with critical mathematics education. Contributors are: Annica Andersson, Tonya Gau Bartell, Richard Barwell, Lisa Lunney Borden, Sunghwan Byun, Anna Chronaki, Brian Greer, Jennifer Hall, Victoria Hand, Kjellrun Hiis Hauge, Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Rune Herheim, Courtney Koestler, Kate le Roux, Swapna Mukhopadhyay, Aldo Parra, Anita Rampal, Sheena Rughubar-Reddy, Toril Eskeland Rangnes, Ulrika Ryan, Lisa Steffensen, Paola Valero and David Wagner.

We develop an analytical frame to support reflection on how love, bullying and solitude appear in communication in mathematics classrooms. The frame distinguishes among communication acts that are responsive or dismissive to others, and identifies how the acts draw on authority to open or close dialogue. Our examination of high school students’ language repertoires revealed that their communication acts influence both their development of mathematics and their interpersonal relationships. To illustrate the framework in use, we draw on transcripts from group interactions in one high school mathematics class. We consider how the particular kinds of communication acts may support and develop caring, antagonism or reclusion. The illustrative analysis illuminates the complexity of human relationships—how communication acts in mathematics classrooms intertwine personal autonomy, interpersonal positioning, and how these communication acts are intertwined with interpersonal positioning.

This chapter reports and problematizes relationships between the expected democratic actions as part of the politically expected democratically inclusion of students’ wishes and concerns; and students’ valuing of mathematical activities in mathematics classrooms, departing from the Swedish results from a large-scale quantitative cross-cultural survey. We asked what are the conflicts between most valued activities by Swedish students and the valuing of democratic actions. The quantitative study showed that students value “knowing the times tables” and “teachers’ explanations” and “correctness” over explorative, communicational and collaborative activities. We discuss the cultural and historical reasons behind these results and argue that we must understand the valuing of times tables or teachers’ explanations as an expression of enculturated and therefore culturally valued actions in mathematics classrooms, where this enculturation takes place not only in school, but in conversations with parents, grandparents, in media and in children’s books. We also argue that the conflict between the political expectations of democratic participation and actions, and the invitation to students to influence teaching on the one hand, and on the other hand students use of this influence through valuing teacher explaining, mastering times tables and understanding why the answer is incorrect, rather conserve a mathematics teaching organised around values as objectism and control than through openness and rationalism.

Drawing on students’ language repertoires for conjecture, we here focus on communication acts to consider students’ mathematical identities in action. Our attention to authority and positioning in mathematics classrooms led us to interrogate the intertwined nature of discourses and how they may make identities available. We use an interaction among a group of grade ten students in a problem-solving situation to illustrate and develop our conceptualization of identities in contexts of intertwining discourses. We consider how the participants position themselves in relation to each other, to mathematics, and to other available discourses, and we ask how their communication acts might serve their purposes within the discourses. We discuss the implications of intertwined discourses for students’ developing identities when communicating in a mathematical context. We argue that one cannot understand students’ mathematical identities without understanding that their communication acts are also part of their repertoires for a range of discourses. This motivates intentional work to support the development of identities accessing available discourses in mathematics learning.

When we count, we have to decide what counts and what does not count. Thus, counting is a political act. Certain language repertoires are necessary to convey the ideas and perhaps even to perform counting actions. At the same time, the language used to describe these ideas and enact the processes shapes the way we conceptualize them. Our interest in the experience of counting includes the way counting and its communication position people. In this chapter we identify how micro-political moves are manifested in language and counting situations, including reciting numbers, counting things present and not, and subordinating counting to another goal. In our analysis, we look for language strategies that enable the process of deciding what to (not) count as the process of establishing boundaries or categories, and we consider how these processes work as political acts.

In this chapter, we consider an interaction among a researcher and four 4-year-old boys who were asked to count beans. By recognizing multiple discourses at play, we problematize the identification of this (and other) interaction as a mathematical (or counting) situation. We identify aspects of the children’s language repertoires and consider how they index various discourses and authority structures. We ask how these discourses intersect in the interaction, and then identify potential implications for education practice and research.

Mathematics is full of mystery. We illuminate the myth to expose two conflicting senses of mystery at work in mathematics and its education practices. There is a sense of boundlessness with mathematics-the idea that we never fully know. There is also a practice of concealment, in which an answer or solution is known by special people who may support or provide a scaffold for students' navigation to the "special" knowledge, but may also challenge their access to it by erecting barriers and boundaries. In remythologizing mystery, we identify that the valorization of mystery in mathematics is rooted in the wonder of exploring boundless landscapes and is used misleadingly to justify school mathematics with the other sense of mystery-uncovering the concealed.

What do teacher colleagues learn when they read our research?Do they wonder what it might be like to teach values that they are not sure of?Do our research colleagues wonder whether role-play could be a set of new data collection methods we could use?In the first session of this Discussion Group we explored the background to values and valuing research in mathematics education with short presentations leading to discussion among participants.Presentations were headed 'Enacting values' [review of foundational literature (Clarkson, Bishop, & Seah, 2010)], 'Projects exploring values and valuing' [describing our work and that of participants (Seah, Andersson, Bishop, & Clarkson, 2016)], and finally 'Methodology challenges' (discussion of affordances and difficulties encountered with present methods).The last part of the session introduced participants to the notion of role-play (Belova, Eilks, & Feierabend, 2013).We self divided into a small group of 'students' and a second larger group of 'research observers'.At the core of the role-play was to experience what it was like to act out a given valuing role ('students'), or observing players who do so ('research observers'), and ascertaining whether identifiable behaviours are more likely to be associated with specific values.To this end we discussed with the 'students' how they might play out a role that showed they were valuing one of the six values that Bishop (1988) had identified, and with the 'research observers' we discussed what behaviour they might expect to be associated with each of these values (Clarkson, 2015).

In this article, the authors propose a set of multi-level questions as a guide for developing an ethical attitude in researcher--participant and researcher--researcher relations during the research writing process. Drawing on the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education, the authors view these relations in terms of power and positionings, in the dialectic between the micro-level of research writing and the wider, macro-level context of mathematics education. The authors illustrate the use of the proposed questions through a back-and-forth dialogue. The dialogue draws on experiences from a writing collaboration in which the authors--"the researchers"--wrote up for publication research conducted in their respective contexts of the Political North and Political South. Both research projects focused on how mathematics students--"the participants"--narrate and hence position themselves and are narrated and positioned by mathematics education and sociopolitical discourses in research publications.

Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in residential schools since the 1870s and until 1996 in Canada with the aim to “kill the Indian in the child.” A Truth and Reconciliat ...