FLM 33(2)-July 2013_FLM

For the Learning of Mathematics 33, 2 (July, 2013) FLM Publishing Association, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada Mathematics has maintained an enduring image as a field of knowledge that lends its resources to many intellectual pursuits and practical applications. School mathematics, however, has responded to a commonly conceived purpose of supplying the world’s workforce with the resources needed to support economic wellbeing. Research intended to inform the practices of mathematics classrooms has often reflected local interpretations of this fundamentally economic agenda. Since the advent of international comparisons, for example, governments have been jockeying for a better position in the resulting league tables. Good performance in international testing programs such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been interpreted as indicating wider economic competitiveness (Brown & Clarke, 2013). Relatively poor performance, however, has often been cited to justify changing educational policies. For example, a recent British government white paper outlining future policy for education in England proposes to expand employment-based models of initial teacher training. It explicitly cites England’s performance in international comparisons such as TIMSS and PISA as a reason for pursuing this approach to training, so that children will compare more favourably with their peers overseas (DfE, 2010) [1]. The (dubious) rationale of the document was that by enabling “a larger proportion of trainees to learn on the job” and by “learning from our best teachers” (p. 23) student teachers would more effectively encounter the realities of school and be better able to implement centralised curriculum and assessment, which are in turn designed to improve England’s international performance. In this article, we argue that our conceptions of mathematics and of ourselves as researchers, teacher educators, teachers and students move on as a result of a broad range of pedagogical or utilitarian agendas, such as improved economic competitiveness or performance in international comparisons. In the first part of the article, we depict the mundane reality of the teacher education programme in which we teach, as an example of a site of specific enactments and conceptions of mathematics. This recently introduced model of school-centred teacher education illustrates how changing practices impact the social construction of school mathematics. Changes in the way mathematics is produced and assessed in schools, for example, have progressively altered the demands made on teacher knowledge and practice. In the second part of the article, we zoom out to offer a more theoretical account of how the evolution of mathematics more generally might be understood in terms of cultural adjustment. That is, we propose that the empirical reality of mathematics today feeds into mathematics itself to change what it is in the future. In this part of the article, we work with the idea that the fields of mathematics and psychology do not describe pre-existing realities. Rather each field depicts realities that are consequential to past human endeavours or conceptualisations of what mathematics is and of what it is to be human. Mathematics is built to reflect the image we have of ourselves and becomes part of those selves that it reflects. We conclude by suggesting that curriculum interventions, whether arising from new models of mathematics teacher education, or from the influence of comparative testing, are not distortions of pre-existing conceptions of mathematics. Rather, they reflect new ways in which mathematics is evolving as a discipline. Such interventions also produce revised conceptions of learners, teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and of how policy works.