Improving undergraduate STEM education requires sustained attention to students’ lived experiences and the ways faculty respond to them. This qualitative study examines how faculty in computer science and mathematics engaged with anonymized student focus group data from students in an NSF S-STEM program. We took the opportunity to reflect on and adjust our teaching, mentoring, and advising practices. The focus group data revealed themes related to academic pacing, mentoring relationships, peer support, and the perceived disconnect of general education requirements, which faculty explored through structured, collaborative reflection. Findings illustrate how centering student voice can prompt meaningful pedagogical and programmatic shifts, highlighting a reflective, interdisciplinary, and reproducible model for fostering more responsive and inclusive STEM learning environments.

The global spread of mass schooling supports ideologies of human capital and consumerism that we can consider as the world’s first monoculture. Educational organisations with global reaches, such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, spread particular mathematics education goals that present opportunities for analysis and critique by mathematics educators who seek to advance causes beyond or in opposition to the consumer industrial complex. In this chapter I utilise Joel Spring’s review of perspectives on globalisation and education to motivate extended analysis of one example of ‘assessment spread’ within mathematics education, namely the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Complementary methods of analysis (historical/contextual and content-based) reveal a strong association between mathematics education assessment spread and the rise of a world culture emphasising human capital and lifelong consumerism.

"Affordances in the third space” is a concept that can improve teacher education and inspires supervisory innovations that can be empirically studied. An intentionally designed hyperdocument workspace fostered collaboration among the university supervisor and classroom mentor teacher and shifted the clinical environment in favor of increased teacher candidate growth.

While there are satisfactory answers to the question “How should we teach children mathematics?”, there are no satisfactory answers to the question “What mathematics should we teach children?”. This paper provides an answer to the last question for preschool children (early childhood), although the answer is also applicable to older children. This answer, together with an appropriate methodology on how to teach mathematics, gives a clear concep- tion of the place of mathematics in the children’s world and our role in helping children develop their mathematical abilities. Briefly, children’s mathematics consists of the world of children’s internal activities that they eventually purposefully organize in order to understand and control the outside world and organize their overall activities in it. We need to support a child in math- ematical activities that she does spontaneously and in which she shows interest, and we need to teach her mathematics that she is interested in developing through these activities. In doing so, we must be fully aware that the child’s mathematics is part of the child’s world of internal activities and is not outside of it. We help the child develop mathematical abilities by developing them in the context of her world and not outside of it. From the point of view of this concep- tion, the standards established today are limiting and too focused on numbers and geometric figures: these topics are too prominent and elaborated, and other mathematical contents are subordinated to them. Adhering to the standards, we drastically limit the mathematics of the child’s world, hamper the correct mathematical development of a child, and we can turn her away from mathematics.

The second edition of Mark Wolfmeyer's award-winning primer offers future and current math teachers an introduction to the connections that exist between mathematics and a critical orientation to education, one that accounts for race, social class, gender, sexuality, language diversity, and ability. Expanded and updated from the first edition, this book demonstrates how elements of human diversity and intersectionality have real effects in the mathematics classroom, and prepares teachers with a more critical math education that increases accessibility and equity for all students. By refocusing math learning toward the goals of democracy and social and environmental crises, the book also introduces readers to broader contemporary school policy and reform debates and struggles, especially in light of Covid-19 and the ongoing struggle for racial equity. Featuring concrete strategies and examples in both formal and informal educational settings, as well as discussion questions for teachers and students, text boxes with examples of critical education in practice, a glossary, and suggestions for further reading, Mark Wolfmeyer shows how critical mathematics education can be put into practice, relevant for undergraduate and graduate students in education, current teachers, and teacher educators.

Introduction to the third and final intallment of the Crtical Education article series (Re)Considering STEM Education.

Although many other factors come to bear on present issues in the contemporary world, vaccine hesitancy and refusal are also the direct result of poor STEM education. In this article we employ a sociological thought experiment methodology to articulate the shortcomings of STEM education and suggest pathways for much needed changes in solving future pandemics and other 21st century challenges. The problems we expose in STEM education include unequal access to high quality education via inter and intra school tracking and curricular issues where STEM does not integrate with other disciplines, like social studies, and fails to engage a critical perspective on STEM informed by advanced philosophies of science and epistemology.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is primarily linked to “vital preparation for today’s high-tech information economy” (Drew, 2011, p. 1) and has become a priority in education worldwide. The omnipotence of STEM discourses have inundated teacher education practices, challenging educators to creatively (re)imagine possibilities for addressing our planet’s critical issues of ecological and social crisis. To better address the complexities of STEM education policy and how it can be articulated through teacher education, this paper highlights how STEM teachers experience and learn about ecojustice education—its theoretical perspective, curricula goals, and implementation challenges in their methods coursework. Specifically, the authors show how STEM teachers can create lesson planning assignments through an ecojustice framework while still serving STEM educational goals.

Although many other factors come to bear on present issues in the contemporary world, vaccine hesitancy and refusal are also the direct result of poor STEM education. In this article we employ a sociological thought experiment methodology to articulate the shortcomings of STEM education and suggest pathways for much needed changes in solving future pandemics and other 21st century challenges. The problems we expose in STEM education include unequal access to high quality education via inter and intra school tracking and curricular issues where STEM does not integrate with other disciplines, like social studies, and fails to engage a critical perspective on STEM informed by advanced philosophies of science and epistemology.

In this paper, the authors utilize a Freirean utopian pedagogy to envision a mathematics education for the future of humanity. To begin, the authors investigate how mathematics and its education correlate to particular dominate social norms and institutions that play a significant role in perpetuating our present shared social reality. Utilizing the work of ecofeminist and ecojustice scholars, the authors explain how mathematics’ and its education perpetuates a “logic of domination.” Next, the authors explore how mathematics and its education could be envisioned and practiced in ways that directly counteract its previous uses and offer alternative pedagogy and curricula choices for fostering a utopian vision where the human race that live in balance with the ecosystem. Drawing from the work of Bateson and philosophers of mathematics, aesthetic aspects of mathematics are shown to be essential aspects of a new form of mathematics. Last, the authors turn to the work of Bookchin to help understand how mathematics can be envisioned to better serve a utopian world marked by anarchist concepts of usufruct, complementarity and “irreducible minimum.” The authors conclude with suggestions to implement an onto-epistemological mathematics education curricula and pedagogy in the classroom.

A current ecocritical trend in curriculum studies necessitates the study of diverse knowledges and contexts. Therefore, the authors present a theoretical conception termed EcoJustice Mathematics Education (EJME). The authors build this new conception upon philosophical reflections, ecofeminist views, and the recognition of the role of language and power in Western culture. The authors assert EJME’s potential to respond to and reframe critical work in mathematics education scholarship and curriculum studies. By assessing critical theories in mathematics, the authors pinpoint the tensions and the potentialities of EJME and offer considerations for future pedagogical practices and research agendas.

Introduction for Volume 6 Number 16

Guest editoral introduction for the (Re)Considering STEM Education series first batch of articles. This introduction reviews the impetus for the series and overviews the papers in this first grouping of accepted manuscripts.

This article synthesizes Paul Feyerabend's controversial contributions to 20th-century philosophy of science through the synthesis of his works and the secondary literature, with specific foci on current trends in educational foundations and the potentials and pitfalls for applying Feyerabendian logics to our work. First, I situate his strains of thought within 20th-century philosophy of science contributions from Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn. Drawing on this explication, the second section pushes against the primary misconception/controversy regarding Feyerabend as a science-hater. In reality, his contributions promote a pluralistic methodology, termed by Feyerabend (1975) as anarchist epistemologies, whereby (a) knowledge seekers draw from scientific methodologies and other traditions to develop competing theories and (b) they adjudicate the best methods to move forward as they seek knowledge and/or solve problems. In the third section, I tease out Feyerabend's complicated relationship to anarchism, where, on the one hand, he himself denounced political anarchism and, on the other, Feyerabend committed to anarchism by using its theory to discuss knowledge production and the role of science in society. Finally, a concluding discussion makes more explicit the specific relevance of these arguments to trends in educational foundations.

For those of us with critical worldviews, our attention is consistently called to the gross injustices witnessed across racial, class, and gender divides as well as the poor health of all life on this planet. However, conversations regarding social injustice seem to happen over here and discussions about environmental crises over there, with little connection between the two.

In our efforts to foster space for critical work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education, we put Barad’s notion of agential realism to work in describing the ontological space of STEM. We suggest three intersecting dimensions to this ontology: STEM as apolitical curricular trend, STEM as Eurocentric economic policy, and STEM as discursive episteme. With the goal of interrupting and proposing alternatives, we conclude by pointing to existing spaces where critical work in mathematics and science education already occurs.

This article introduces 1) an extensive analysis of the messy, entangled web of the politics of math education and 2) a novel method for policy analysis. I have identified a policy network surrounding math education for America that presents the following interrelated interests: a national math education that develops human capital (the characteristics of productive workers), debates over traditional and reform pedagogy, agreement on a content knowledge deficit of math teachers, and a math education that fuels an education services sector. This article primarily describes the first of these trends, the notion that math education for America produces in people those intangible qualities usable by businesses.