ICME14 Day 4

On the fourth day of the conference, apart from Thematic Afternoon in the morning (Norwegian time), and China Art and Culture Performance in the afternoon (which I will not blog about), the only ingredient was a plenary lecture by Robyn Jorgensen titled "Equity in Mathematics: What Does It mean? What Might It Look like?" (As I am currently doing some work myself on diversity in mathematics education, including race, gender, sexuality, class, functionality, culture, geography and ethnicity, I'm especially interested in this topic.)

She started the talk with addressing the myth of ability. We know that people's lack of success is often not connected to innate qualities. There is a difference between equality and equity - we do not want to treat everybody equally; people need to be treated differently. During the thirty years she has been working on equity (and even before that), there has been many concepts that have been in play: ability, giftedness, talent, ability grouping, access, sucsess, achievement and participation, recognition of difference, ethnomathematics (D'Ambrosio, Gerdes...), socially critical theories, habitus, Bernstein, power, hegemony, ideology, groups (race, gender, class, language...), "post" theories, identity, race theory, linguistic diversity, culturally responsive pedagogy... She stressed the importance of the organization and conferences "Mathematics Education and Society" (which I will attend for the first time this year - it will be interesting).

She claimed that the field has done a lot of work, but has not made a lot of impact in the 50 years. Therefore she wanted to point to problematic practices. For instance, the programme Direct Instruction in Remote Indigenous contexts has had questionable impact, and seems not to be culturally responsive. We need to approach a strength-based pedagogy, instead of identifying gaps and trying to fill them with scripted instruction. Different people have different world-views, and these need to be taken into account. 

She then went on to talk about a project called "Remote Numeracy Project", a project researching successful learning (instead of "what do teachers/leaders... do wrong?"). Approximately 40 schools were included, all over Australia. (This seems like a very good approach, different to most research, as seen in Smestad/Gillespie 2019...) Some schools that were doing well in mathematics, "protested" that they did not focus on mathematics at all - they focussed on well-being, safety, getting the students to come to school and to have healthy food... The schools seemed to have ways of enabling their teachers, who were often novice teachers. The researchers therefore looked at the envisioned practices, the enabled practices and the enacted practices. (Which is an interesting variant on Goodlad.) She discussed each of these in some detail, which I'll not try to summarize here. She stressed the importance of "embedding mathematics" - both in the contexts and cultures and in the brain. Also, mathematics is as much about language as it is about mathematical concepts, and for instance using the home language in mathematics was important. Also, being explicit about what was expected and how lessons were structured and so on. 

Although Jorgensen gave a complex picture that I have in no way been able to convey here, much of it was what is today generally considered good mathematics teaching, but with some extra elements concerning the vision and leadership of the school and the extra focus on the home language and culture. But there is surely more detail to be found in the articles, reports and case studies produced in the project.