Sensing and making sense of difference in mathematics learning
Loading...
Date
2024
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Gesellschaft für Didaktik der Mathematik
Abstract
Despite policies that emphasise Inclusive Education, mathematics curricula, along with other school structures, continue to privilege the idea of the “normal” student, a construct that marginalises, and excludes many learners. This talk will focus on the challenges involved in constructing an inclusive school mathematics: a school mathematics in which classroom practices and discourses are congruent with the diverse ways that different students sense and make sense of mathematical knowledge. It will attempt to expose how discriminatory visions of students’ potential for learning, compounded by the myth of independence and the artificial separation of cognition from emotion, deter or disallow some learners from engaging with mathematics. It will be argued that in current curricula, the hegemonic use of tools and/or curricula designed with some notion of a normal body in mind contributes to the disabling of many learners who inhabit what come to be labelled as deficient or deviant bodies. An alternative vision will be offered in which, rather than deficiency, difference is treated as diversity, inspiration, expansion, challenge, disruption, and as renewal. Ways of working mathematically, designed with this view of difference in mind will be presented, in order to exemplify how classroom cultures that legitimize and validate learning differences and support the mathematical well-being of those who are currently depreciated by normative classroom expectations and discourses.
Description
Table of contents
Keywords
Inklusion, Curriculum