Mathematics Education for Solidarity and Hope: Grafting, (Re)Growing and Nurturing

Dear Colleagues,

We write in the context of a burning planet, increasing and destructive inequality with a few corporations “owning” an inordinate share of the world’s resources, the migration of peoples across the globe which inevitably follows, and war and genocide and ethnic cleansing. Mathematics increasingly formats how we see this social world, usually in an ethical vacuum. The planet is understood as a resource to be exploited despite its being the case that our survival demands that air, oceans, climate systems, planetary resources and species diversity is held in common. Environments are damaged and inequalities deepen. Mathematically based models such as cost benefit analyses have privileged intensive destructive land use and the processing of finite resources into throwaway products. Technological change, based on mathematical algorithms, has wrought seismic changes in how we relate to one another. Increasingly, operational decisions are deferred to AI systems, underpinned by mathematics; already, at times, these facilitate discrimination and exclusion. Mathematics is assumed to be neutral and value free despite its use in these morally complex contexts. Capitalism, colonialism and the climate emergency are inextricably intertwined and, for many, a world not based on neoliberalism has become unimaginable

Education in the “West” and beyond, particularly in mathematics classrooms, has been saturated with values of competitive individualism to prepare for a life of acquisitive consumer capitalism. Across the globe, a new form of education colonisation has imposed neoliberal values, thinking and practices on the majority world with education as a commodity – a thing, a product, something with an exchange value in the human marketplace of neoliberalism. Mathematics classrooms can be experienced as hopelessly constrained by the dominant purpose of attaining qualifications with a high exchange value, by a performativity culture and by becoming places where young people are trained in rule-following obedience. Through testing, it is appropriated to justify social selection. Indigenous and other non-hegemonic mathematical knowledges mostly go unrecognised in classrooms. There is no space in the globally aligned school mathematics curriculum to ask questions about mathematics itself and our relationship with it.

This Special Issue will focus on how mathematics itself, mathematics education (theoretically and in practice) and/or mathematics education research (both in terms of methodology and content) might be differently imagined. We are open to what have been called “disorderly” approaches as well as more conventional ones. We do not expect certainty, consensus, resolution or, even, coherence. We expect contributions to offer support for: values of cooperation, interconnectedness, equity, solidarity and respect; different ways of knowing with a nuanced plurality of perspectives and a recognition of the importance of democratization of debates; a collective vision of a desirable future; and an ethics of the commons and of care. We are also looking for hope.

Prof. Dr. Hilary Povey
Ms. Corinne Angier
Guest Editors

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• mathematics education
• social and ecological justice
• innovative methodologies